Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fictions 9781442690196

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FALLING INTO MATTER

Too intense a Contemplation is not the Business of Flesh and Blood; it must by the necessary Course of Things, in a little Time, let go its Hold, and fall into Matter. Swift, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1710)

ELIZABETH R. NAPIER

Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fiction from Defoe to Shelley

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4198-3 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Napier, Elizabeth R., 1950– Falling into matter : problems of embodiment in English fiction from Defoe to Shelley / Elizabeth R. Napier. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4198-3 1. English fiction – 18th century – History and criticism. literature. 3. Mind and body in literature. I. Title. PR858.B63N36 2012

823⬘.5093561

2. Human body in

C2011-906448-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

To Andrew and Harriet, with love And to my teachers, Martin Battestin and Ralph Cohen, in appreciation

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

xi

1 Robinson Crusoe: Discord

3

2 Gulliver’s Travels: Shock

27

3 Clarissa: Grace

62

4 Tom Jones: Cohesion

89

5 A Simple Story: Dissipation 6 Frankenstein: Dissociation Epilogue Notes

184

187

Works Cited Index

247

225

125 166

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Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to Middlebury College, whose grants of leave of absence from teaching were invaluable in the writing of this book. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers of the University of Toronto Press, whose rigorous questions and suggestions made this, I hope, a better work. Richard Ratzlaff was a sustaining presence as the typescript gradually changed its shape under his editorial aegis, and I am particularly thankful for his support.

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Introduction

This book is concerned with problems of embodiment in six early works of English fiction. In each of these works, giving physical expression to ideas or desires, rendering materially the stuff of the mind or spirit, ‘bodying forth’ matters of the heart, unleashes a spate of difficulties that curtail individual freedom and dignity and obstruct the creation of beauty (aesthetic, spiritual, or personal). This problem, which is explicitly tied to the body and its ability to express substance of high moment, preoccupies fiction writers of the period from Defoe to Shelley. It is a recurring issue for the novel as a genre as it struggles to disengage itself, as in the case of Defoe, from a largely Puritan past, and it is also a subject to which writers such as Swift and, later, Richardson repeatedly revert, monitoring the body in its relationship to matters of the mind or spirit and measuring its capacity for moral action. My contention is that, though the novel becomes steadily more ‘embodied’ as the century proceeds (in that it achieves a more satisfying balance between the performative, or the dramatic, and the hortatory and the reflective), the genre returns persistently to the reservations of spiritual autobiographers such as Defoe and of satirists such as Swift, that the body has a disjunctive relationship to the realm of ideas. The body, in this sense, occupies a central and volatile position in the development of the novel in the period. Eighteenth-century novelists, in their manifest attention to corporeal matters, strive to understand the relationship of the body to their art, essaying an increasingly dramatic presentation of ideas while at the same time calling repeated attention to the limitations of such a project. Though the incarnation of things of the mind or spirit appears in hindsight one of the most distinctive markers of the novel, even (as Shelley appears to argue in Frankenstein) a prerequisite for the creation of viable art, the development of such a notion is neither uniform nor consistent in the period. The dislocation of focus of Robinson Crusoe and Victor Frankenstein (their failure

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to join in a truly productive manner the ideological and the real) shows that on many levels the task of imaginative rendering continues in the early novel to be conceived as an onerous one, as it does for Richardson and even for Inchbald, with their broadly social visions and their intensely antisocial views of the embodied self. Such problems of embodiment in early fiction may be presented and articulated as explicitly artistic predicaments – as they are, obviously, for Shelley, and less obviously but no less compellingly, for Defoe and for Swift – or as personal or spiritual ones, as is the case for Richardson, Fielding, and Inchbald. In each arena the body interferes in significant ways with the reception and expression of messages of a ‘higher’ order. Though it can in theory lend (as it does on occasion in Clarissa) exquisite grace to human intercourse, can ‘ground’ ideals (of virtue, or goodness) in the real world (as in Tom Jones and in much sentimental fiction), the body does not always participate cooperatively or reliably in the creation and expression of meaning. A strange schism, not always amenable to authorial control, often afflicts early novelistic characters at moments at which their articulation of personal, spiritual needs is most fraught, a dissociation of soul and body that rends Crusoe and Clarissa and that dichotomizes the profoundly embodied Miss Milner and her paler, more sentimental daughter, and the ideologue Frankenstein and his creature. Such blurring of vision attests to the volatility of the body and its potential for damage as it intrudes at moments of high expression. It is these difficulties – and their reconciliation – that the present book discusses. The novels on which I have focused in this inquiry were chosen in order to reflect the following: how the awkward dialogues of body and soul in Defoe and Swift exhibit the struggles incident to the development of the novel as it wrests itself from an antipodal view of body and spirit derived largely from Puritanism and satire; how in the century’s two greatest novelists, Richardson and Fielding, the body undergoes strenuous aesthetic and moral evaluation to divergent ends; and how in Elizabeth Inchbald’s extraordinary and undervalued work of sensibility, A Simple Story, the legible yet intensely private language of the body (now fully understood by an eighteenth-century reading public) works to disrupt the contractual relationships necessary to any civilized or mutual state. Frankenstein reverses the premises of A Simple Story and Robinson Crusoe (in which the corporeal is displaced or absented from serious and lasting imaginative acts), making clear the central role of the body in the creation of art. Aside from the basic outlines described above, there appears to be no clear progression among novelists of the period towards a resolution of the problem of the body as it applies to the artistic imagination and to the writer’s craft. Each author whom I examine here addresses the issue in his or her own idi-

Introduction

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osyncratic way: for some (such as Richardson and Fielding), it occupies the centre of their artistic consciousness and mission; for others (such as Defoe), it haunts the borders, indirectly imperilling the very enterprise it sets in motion. For Swift, concerns about the body dominate and eventually dismantle a narrative that shifts restlessly between the novelistic and the satiric, its purpose so broadcast as to challenge easy attempts at generic classification. My study tracks the body as it intrudes itself on all levels of these highly distinctive works, from that of plot to those of character and narrative style. Inchbald and Shelley, the most ‘modern’ of the writers whom I study, and in whose works corporeal issues are addressed most dramatically, examine directly the aesthetic and ‘civic’ problems of the embodied state. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, embodiment is tied to the developing genre of the novel in fundamental and explicit ways. A fiercely heterogeneous form, the novel, especially in its initial iterations, seizes on a wide range of literary and non-literary kinds, gathering to itself a rich variety of types and styles. Defoe and Swift are central to this study, not because they are commonly regarded as England’s first novelists (for they are not), but because they establish (and by extension limit) certain parameters for the novel early in the period. For this reason alone they are indispensable to any project that seeks to address questions of genre. They are of particular significance to this study because they seem to sense the deep implicatedness of the body in the rising genre of the novel, because they initiate questions about the body and human action-in-the-world that continue, even after the novel assumes recognizable shape, to concern later practitioners of the genre. Both writers are poised at the start of the novel’s course to generic coherence and complexity later in the century; both spell out clearly (Defoe positively, Swift negatively) the connectedness of bodily issues to the narrative strategies that will assume more clearly novelistic form in the works of Richardson and Fielding. The body is central to the imagination of Swift and Defoe, preoccupying them on the level of plot and defining the peculiar ‘objectivity’ of their style. In light of recent debates about the generic status of the works of Swift, in particular, it seems timely to stir these issues of classification up again and use them to interrogate just what we mean when we speak of a ‘novelistic’ imagination or sensibility, and how dependent such an imagination or sensibility is upon a direct engagement of bodily issues. Defoe’s special importance to this investigation stems more narrowly from his sustained probing throughout Robinson Crusoe into the nature of the intercourse between body and spirit. Such questions are framed both explicitly and implicitly in Defoe’s novel, in Crusoe’s speculations about divine expression and intent and in the ways in which Defoe represents the activities and medita-

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tions of his politico-spiritual hero. Defoe’s narrative style, bent on representing both realms of Crusoe’s experience, betrays a repeated proclivity towards rupture (with his ideological passages going one way and his insistent literalism, a curious forecast of Swift’s way with metaphor, going the other); his focus on Crusoe’s physical and spiritual adventures demonstrates the same fascinating pattern. The pressures of Defoe’s Puritan outlook, which both impel and stall the emerging genre of the novel (as Damrosch and Hunter have forcefully discussed), are not, in effect, relieved until Fielding transposes Defoe’s spiritual project onto a more humanistic field, arguing convincingly that the body can both express and assimilate higher truths. That Fielding solves the problem of Puritanism for the novel by revoking a claim to inwardness is interesting evidence that the two domains are still at odds. The dislocatory relationship of body and mind becomes in this way one of the central issues that the genre must solve if it is to mature as a literary form. And it is a problem that Defoe and Swift hand down to the masters of the genre, Richardson and Fielding, who address it in radically different ways. Faced with the question of the body posed so stridently, even unpleasantly, by Defoe and Swift – with Defoe treating obliquely problems of the body that Swift confronts directly (too directly, perhaps) – practitioners of the novel, by the time of Gulliver’s Travels, can be in no doubt about the terms of the problem, for they have been formulated with dreadful clarity. To Swift, the body limits the quest for higher meaning, and any enterprise in which the body is engaged must by definition sink of its own grotesque weight. If Gulliver’s Travels is not a novel, it speaks to and registers the terms of the emerging genre, and one of its central procedural questions, with spectacular distinctness. Richardson and Fielding, though in antithetical ways, move the question of the body to the forefront of the emerging genre. Distrustful of the body’s innate penchant towards theatricality, and deeply interested in questions of volition and agency, Richardson sets his thoughtful heroine adrift in a sea of poseurs and encroachers who confound the terms of the body, challenging its ability to contain and protect an integral self. Extending Defoe’s and Swift’s bifurcated models of the person into a more dynamic field, Richardson demonstrates profound unrest at the idea of the enacting self. Preoccupied with the relationship of action and intention, Richardson in effect begs the question of how or even whether desires can be enacted – whether one can act without motive or act against one’s will (Clarissa at the garden gate, Lovelace urged on by the Widow Sinclair). The possibility that an act may ‘occur’ in despite of the will, ‘realizing’ itself through pressure by others or at a moment in which the will has deserted the body, is of particular concern to Richardson. Clarissa’s description of the pivotal moment at the garden gate – in which, as she repeatedly tells

Introduction

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Anna Howe, she was ‘tricked out of [her]self’ – suggests the extreme difficulty of assigning volition to acts of the body. That one can act without the ratification of the will, involuntarily, points not only to the body’s hegemony (a fear that Richardson may inherit from Swift) but also to its ability to act outside of or against the self in a mechanical and independent way. Clarissa’s eventual disengagement from the world of the body – the elevation of her will outside and beyond the corporeal stage – exemplifies Richardson’s profound pessimism about the attainability of a coherent self and the accommodation of such a self in a fallen world. Fielding, in Tom Jones, though he shares Richardson’s view (as exemplified in Richardson’s eponymous heroine) that virtue can take on human form, adopts a stance diametrically at odds with that of his rival as to the disposition of the ‘ensouled’ body in the real world. The epistemological and aesthetic questions of embodiment posed in Clarissa are confidently solved in Tom Jones: Fielding places the body emphatically at the moral centre of his narrative, celebrating and enacting through a dynamic plot the primacy of the body in the expression of the high truths of charity and love. Propelled forward by the physical vigour of its own actors (most notably, Tom, but also Sophia), Fielding’s great novel displays a Swiftian scepticism about ideals that exalt man above the realm of the actual, and welcomes the broadened opportunities for moral responsibility that the body brings by virtue of its connectedness to the fallen world. Here the competing claims of body and spirit delineated by Defoe, Swift, and Richardson are settled: for Fielding, postlapsarian England (which he regards from a generous and comic perspective) provides ample occasions for the exercise of goodness, and man’s vocation is to enact there those ideals of benevolence that will knit humans together in a community of mutual responsibility and love. Human action, thus, though it is, as for Richardson, liable to misconstruction and to repercussions of a potentially problematic kind, is the keystone of Fielding’s moral and narrative world. Sentimental novelists before and after Fielding concur with him in locating the tremulous sensorium of goodness in the body. And such tremulousness abounds in Inchbald’s A Simple Story. But divested of an authoritative narrative voice, unhinged from the moral certainties that give Fielding’s work weight, and sceptical about the innate altruism of the body and its copious lexicon of expression, Inchbald’s work raises issues about the body’s expressive powers that point to its potentially lethal effect on any human community based on ideals of contract. In the facility (indeed, sometimes, impetuosity) with which the body in Inchbald’s novel conveys the truths of the heart, contractual agreements that shore up social interactions and institutions are repeatedly imperilled. Inchbald’s notion that the body asserts its claims asocially, and in ways

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that tend to short-circuit the will or the heart, recalls Richardson’s apprehensions about the libertine (and machine-like) Lovelace, whom Inchbald’s Miss Milner resembles in startling ways. Shelley, who in Frankenstein treats the body as an explicit issue of art, agrees with Inchbald that corporealization unalloyed is both asocial and monstrous. But to reject corporeality in order to embrace a higher world is, as demonstrated by the radical failure of Frankenstein’s project, more blasphemous still. Humans are constrained, Shelley argues, to work with mortal materials; our desire to transcend such limitations both testifies to our hubris and guarantees our unhappiness. If Inchbald’s Miss Milner enacts her desires with alarming fluency, Shelley’s scientist (unless he intends on some level the destruction of all he holds dear) suffers from the opposite tendency: blinded to the imperatives of his own body and those of others, he works at a deliberate distance from the world that confers on him his human identity. Intimately connected with matters of the flesh while at the same time seeking to repudiate their terms, Frankenstein’s creation demonstrates that any attempt to alienate the physical from the work of art will result in unhallowed productions that have the capacity of almost apocalyptic damage. The eighteenth century, as Juliet McMaster has argued, is a period in which bodily expressions in painting and the theatre become standardized through such theorists as Le Brun and Lavater. Eighteenth-century novelists, despite a pervasive distrust of theatre and spectacle and a deep suspicion of the ‘performing’ self, profit from readers’ literacy in such expressive signs. It is one of the curiosities of the novelistic genre that, given the centrality of the body to the enterprise of fiction, the careers of novel and drama are not more contiguous and their corporeal dictionaries more consistently common. A language of gesture appropriate to and increasingly codified in theatre (most popularly, through the efforts of Garrick) does (often self-consciously) make its way into the novel, as is seen most clearly in Inchbald’s A Simple Story. But at bottom the relationship of the early novel to drama is antagonistic: the histrionics of Lovelace (and even Crusoe and Gulliver) or of Frankenstein’s Creature are deeply suspect. ‘Theatricality,’ with its emphasis on exteriority and ontological instability, poses a significant threat to the novel throughout the eighteenth century, as the new genre attempts to balance the dramatic (the performative) and the meditative (the reflective) in its own distinctive way. Some of the suspicion of the dramatic (as in Richardson) derives from a lingering Puritan distaste for the stage; but, more fundamentally, there is uncertainty about if and how superficial evidence may be ‘read’ (as in Robinson Crusoe) and profound distrust about role playing – an activity in which the body, divested of a stable self, can easily engage (Crusoe, Lovelace, Miss Milner, even Gulliver). The

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moral, social, aesthetic, and philosophical problems that arise when the body is set in motion by the heart or soul (or glands) are of profound interest to such ‘performative’ novels. There is much evidence that a novelistic lexicon of corporeal signs is rapidly developing after Richardson, and there are many novelists other than those whom I treat in this study who are adept in this language – among them, Sterne, Smollett, Burney, and Austen, as well as Gothic and sentimental writers – to whom the body is of profound interest. Amatory fiction and popular fiction of the early decades of the century, in which the body – especially the female body – assumes a central and often deeply destabilizing role, and sentimental fiction, which valorizes the body as a locus of sensation that is ‘beyond’ language, evince the implicit – perhaps central – relationship of the body to the novel form, and, as Peter Brooks has suggested, to the act of narration in general (xii). The novels chosen here reflect not only some of the deepest, earliest, and most varied concerns about the relationship of corporeality and meaning in the period, but also the central if uneasy place of embodiment in the development of the novel as a literary genre. Critical discussions of the body, pioneered largely by French feminist critics and Michel Foucault, may be found in a number of excellent studies of the English eighteenth century. The works of Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter on illness and health; of Thomas Laqueur, Jean Hagstrum, and Paul-Gabriel Boucé on sexuality; and of Carol Houlihan Flynn on the body in Swift and Defoe; studies of sentimental fiction and sensibility by Paul Goring, Ann Jessie Van Sant, John Mullan, and Geoffrey Sill; and recent books by Alan McKenzie, Juliet McMaster, Dennis Todd, and Daniel Cottom on the semiotics of the body yield useful insights into a period in which notions of the biological, social, and cultural body and its ‘language’ were undergoing significant change. My interest in corporeality in the eighteenth-century novel has been deepened by the work of such critics, who have explored the social and cultural implications of the body in the period and charted ways in which in early fiction the body relays the internal discourse of the self. The focus of this book, however, is less on the prolific information that may be borne or conveyed by the body – this path of inquiry, though immensely valuable, is now fairly well worn – than on the aesthetic and ideological crises to which in the developing genre of the novel it regularly gives rise. Upon such matters eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers and critics (far less hesitant than modern commentators to pronounce judgments on aesthetic grounds) have contributed particularly vivid records, and one of my intentions in this project has been to recover those expressions of pleasure – and sometimes of outrage – that

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mark important early commentary on the fiction of the period. Such responses, which dwell often on issues of morality and on peculiarities of style, illuminate consistently how central to the genre – and how problematic to its practitioners – is the experience of the body. Throughout the century corporeality poses an insistent challenge to early novelists. It is a problem inseparable from the genre’s Puritan heritage and a point on which writers of the novel focus, in this increasingly dramatic yet increasingly internalized of forms, disquietude about the materiality of artistic and spiritual expression – whether, in effect, the body can sustain or endure the transcendent impulses of art and grace. Such concerns, I argue, are not only refracted in the ways in which eighteenth-century novels repeatedly pose spiritual and moral questions about the body, testing the body’s ability to contain and enact higher impulses, but are also implicated in the development of the novel as a genre in which the body and materiality make increasingly strident and wide-ranging claims for writers’ aesthetic attention. To ‘fall into Matter’ (to adopt Swift’s theologically resonant and disturbingly literal expression from The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit) is an inseparable feature of the imaginative experience of a novel, of its consumption and of its genesis. The realization of this premise and the extent of early novelists’ recoil from it are the troubling subject matter of this book.

FALLING INTO MATTER

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1 Robinson Crusoe: Discord

L’imagination … est la condition nécessaire de la liberté de l’homme empirique au milieu du monde. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire He lacked the poetic touch. Charles Mackay (?) on Defoe

Midway through Robinson Crusoe, in one of the tale’s most celebrated moments, Crusoe comes unexpectedly upon a solitary footprint in the sand. The scene – at once stark (in the austerity of its detail) and inflammatory (in the terrified speculation that it inspires on Crusoe’s part) – epitomizes the power and the problem of the physical in Defoe’s novel. As a single print (rather than one of two, or many), the mark disturbs the possibility of easy interpretation, encouraging reading on a number of mutually exclusive levels. It signifies, in Crusoe’s mind, either a spiritual presence (the devil) or a physical being (a human: himself or a savage); to the reader, or to Defoe, it may suggest, more complexly, some conflation of these alternatives. Challenging the outlines of Crusoe’s spatial and temporal world (for what it signifies lies in an unretrievable moment in time), its origin on this most real of islands is, presumably, self-evident, deriving from a perfectly natural cause, yet in its singleness it is somehow monitory, appearing to carry a message from a supernatural realm. Crusoe’s response to this most paradoxical and paradigmatic of signs seems simultaneously to unleash and to defy verbal expression. He lavishes upon the footprint a wild overflow of fearful imaginings, ‘innumerable fluttering Thoughts’ (112), in which his ‘affrighted Imagination’ conjures up ‘various Shapes,’ ‘wild Ideas,’ and ‘strange unaccountable Whimsies’ (112), fears,

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‘Vapours’ (115, 116), and ‘Confusion of … Thoughts’ (116), the range of which is said to be, in Crusoe’s words, ‘[im]possible to describe’ (112). After a period of reflection, in which he appears to compose himself and recover his faith in God’s providence, Crusoe returns to the footprint to see if it could have been made by him. As if to challenge Crusoe’s egocentrism and to gesture at a far larger physical world than Crusoe imagines, the print not only is improbably still there, but also is found, suggestively, to be far larger than his own. His sameness and otherness to whoever or whatever left the print now paradoxically certified (Crusoe ‘measure[s] the Mark with [his] own Foot’ and finds his foot ‘not so large by a great deal’ [115]) and his regency over the island, and perhaps over himself, contested, the print, which before, as Crusoe somewhat enigmatically says, left ‘no Room for [Fancy]’ (112) (by which he appears to mean that its significance is unequivocal), gives rise to ‘new Imaginations,’ and Crusoe returns to his home shaking with cold, ‘like one in an Ague’ (115). The drama of these moments points vividly both to Defoe’s need to corporealize Crusoe’s fears and the difficulties he experiences in so doing. As in the incidents of the corn, the avenging angel, and the tobacco, Defoe simultaneously approaches and erases vestiges of the ‘real,’ licensing the reader to struggle with his interpretation of such scenes and reinforcing his sense of unease about the degree to which the real and the ideal ‘co-signify’ in a work in which spiritual and dramatic concerns often compete for the reader’s attention. This tension manifests itself not only in the dissonance between allegory and mimesis in the structure and style of the novel but also, as that tension narrows onto the performing Crusoe, in a schismatic model of self and body that points to profound reservations about the body’s expressive aptitude and about the empowering and liberating effects of the imagination. Critical commentary on Robinson Crusoe has reflected this dissidence between the claims of the body and those of the soul. Countering Ian Watt’s view of the novel as secular and individualistic (Rise of the Novel 60–92), critics such as G.A. Starr (Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography) and J. Paul Hunter (Reluctant Pilgrim) have insisted, as forcibly, on the Puritan cast of Defoe’s work, calling attention to Defoe’s orthodox use of the materials and techniques of spiritual autobiography. John J. Richetti (Defoe’s Narratives 1–20) and Leopold Damrosch, mediating between these two approaches, expand on Watt’s notion of the novel as a secularization of Puritan techniques and themes, finding in the dissonance between the profane and spiritual strains of the work testimony of the novel’s struggles to define its mimetic values and prerogatives against those literary and ideological energies that threaten to ‘unman’ it – namely, religious allegory and romance.1 Under this reading Crusoe’s situation on the island, as he positions himself in various ways towards his own spiritu-

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ality, becomes paradigmatic of the novel’s attempts to define itself in relation to the fictional and non-fictional genres that preceded it. Such a perspective on Defoe’s tale is compelling, for it engages two of the most persistent questions of Defoe’s art: that of its generic classification and that of its coherence, the often embattled marriage in his fictional memoirs of enacted drama and moral tract. It is my contention that these two strains of Defoe’s first novel are rarely brought into harmonious dialogue and that the polarization of the two foci of the story – secular and sacred, mimetic and ideological, corporeal and ethereal – is an issue that Defoe, when he considers it as a narrative problem, treats apologetically; moreover, his failure, as he writes, to link the two domains, to ‘knot’ them, as it were, through the actions of his protagonist Crusoe, points to a scepticism about the imaginative enterprise that is a distinguishing mark of Defoe’s aesthetic. Thus, the novel’s distinctive movement – the oscillation between constraint and deliverance – cannot be stilled, and Crusoe, unable truly to embody the spiritual enlightenment that Defoe pretends to deliver, is forced by his own author-father compulsively to reenact his own fears and desires to serve the ends of a narrative that caters to the opposite of its spiritual claims: a microscopic as opposed to a macroscopic view, a stance of theatre as opposed to rest, a kinetic versus a static outlook. The dilemma forecasts concerns about the incompatibility of corporeal and spiritual that will mark the novel throughout the eighteenth century. The body could, in theory, mediate between the world of materiality and that of the spirit, as the emotions, rarefied, could link the soul to God. But in Robinson Crusoe commerce between the spiritual and material worlds tends to be indirect, to be channelled through rhetoric or texts; there seems to be no straight route from the body or the emotions to God. Crusoe’s body, as a kind of theatre of punishment, often serves as a message board for God’s monitions, as Crusoe ‘wanders,’ is shipwrecked, and falls ill with the ague, but such corporeal realization of spiritual matters does not occur consistently in the novel. Crusoe’s conversion, towards which the narrative, under the Puritan reading, must steadily move, takes place during the time of his aguish fever, but this critical spiritual event occurs in the first third of the novel; the dramatic peripeteia, as if running late, follows long afterward. Indeed, unless one argues (with Halewood and Sill) that Robinson Crusoe traces the vicissitudes of a soul veering between repentance and doubt (Halewood 345–7) or in the throes of passions that he must learn to control (Sill 87–8), it appears evident that the abstract and mimetic planes of the narrative are often at odds with each other and that this falling into asymmetry is not controlled in any overt way by Defoe. From the meditative passages on Crusoe’s spiritual condition Defoe often turns abruptly, and with relief, to the ‘historical’ part of his story,2 and readers from Rousseau

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to Ian Watt have shown disregard or intolerance towards the narrative’s hortatory side.3 Crusoe’s extended deliberations about the meaning of the term ‘Deliverance’ and his insistence after his ‘Cure’ that he has learned to take the word ‘in a different [that is, spiritual] Sense’ (71) provides a concentrated semantic version of the novel’s larger dilemma: Crusoe here, in attempting to fix this highly volatile term in a spiritual lexicon, barring it from associations of a ‘lower’ (bodily) kind, appears to recommend a type of reading that fits a different kind of text altogether – one like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The physical under this rubric is demoted to the status of a mere vehicle, a ‘proxy’ (to use Coleridge’s term [The Statesman’s Manual 30]) for higher meaning: Now I began to construe the Words mentioned above, Call on me, and I will deliver you, in a different Sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no Notion of any thing being call’d Deliverance, but my being deliver’d from the Captivity I was in; for tho’ I was indeed at large in the Place, yet the Island was certainly a Prison to me, and that in the worst Sense in the World; but now I learn’d to take it in another Sense: Now I look’d back upon my past Life with such Horrour, and my Sins appear’d so dreadful, that my Soul sought nothing of God, but Deliverance from the Load of Guilt that bore down all my Comfort: As for my solitary Life it was nothing; I did not so much as pray to be deliver’d from it, or think of it; It was all of no Consideration in Comparison to this: And I add this Part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true Sense of things, they will find Deliverance from Sin a much greater Blessing than Deliverance from Affliction. (71)

This passage is an arresting example of Defoe’s mastery in keeping the two levels of his tale in irritating flux, for even as Crusoe as ‘interpreter’4 attempts to pry apart the spiritual and secular dimensions of the affliction that is also his cure, the two realms collapse complexly into one, yet with Crusoe (as initially with the footprint) encouraging a transcendental reading of his situation that dismisses much of its appeal. The point of view here is, ultimately, bifocal, and Crusoe (and Defoe) are at this moment using the lenses that strengthen their far-sighted vision. Crusoe’s insistence that ‘true’ deliverance comes from God is, however, not subsequently ratified by the dramatic plane of the narrative, for he soon reverts to the physical meaning of the term in his attempts to leave the island. Defoe, too, trains attention on this question of physical well-being as he follows the movements of the cannibals and devises the episode of the mutineers. This bifurcation of focus, familiar to (and prized by) any reader of Defoe, has significant repercussions on the psychological plane of the novel (which,

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ideally, works to knit the physical and spiritual together). Thus, the introspection that, as many critics have noted, should accompany Crusoe’s solitary life and the writing of his journal does not, in fact, in any profound sense, occur: much as the journal entries dissolve erratically and unpredictably into the descriptive account of the novel, ‘devaluing’ the more intimate records of Crusoe’s experience, so Crusoe’s obsessive attention to physical protection generates few events of larger psychological import. The ‘internal’ repeatedly is moved aside for the ‘external’ in such instances, as if the notion of a private self is either alien to Defoe, or not valuable enough for him to want to protect. Crusoe’s elaborate walls are no bower of (introspective) bliss but rather, as their military embellishments later clearly show, defensive ramparts designed to keep the outer world at bay. Perhaps this demarcation is overstated because Crusoe’s grasp of the difference between outer and inner is so slight. Damrosch writes persuasively about ‘how consistently [Robinson Crusoe] refuses to let us see into Crusoe,’ how ‘almost nothing of his inner life is revealed’ (209, 187). Indeed, even in his most intensely spiritual and emotional moments, Crusoe tends to look beside himself (para nous) rather than inwards, deflecting his focus onto texts, rhetorical figures, or melodramatic gestures, in large part because Defoe does not believe that the internal self (as we understand it) need ratify in any ‘individual’ way the cure that is being administered ‘from the outside.’5 This is not to say that the self must not ‘agree’ to repent, but that it alone cannot ‘generate’ the repentance. God, indeed, may time His visits to coincide with moments of stupefaction (as in the case of extreme illness) or shock (as in the case of the dream). But if God’s decrees are not fully internalized or embodied, Crusoe’s repentance and conversion are as disposable as the objects he leaves behind when he sails away with the English captain. Such a possibility of provisional religion necessarily brings issues of style and theme into deadlock, making possible the strange critical dilemma of being able to argue from a thematic perspective that Crusoe’s political manoeuvrings at the finale of the island episodes represent an internalization of God’s might, and simultaneously maintain from the point of view of tone that it is difficult to imagine God condoning the cannibal slaughter and the gross theatrics with which the novel closes. The problem is the characteristically Defoean one of incongruence between style and theme: an event that makes thematic sense may not bear scrutiny from the point of view of presentation. Such a dilemma is manageable and interesting on the narrative level, but when it makes its way onto the psychological plane of the novel or, as Sill has argued, broaches that realm, the situation becomes more complex. Irony and role playing are irresponsible or pathological in a mental world that is not familiar, so when Crusoe assumes an air of bemused

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self-detachment in his rescue of the English captain, he engages in a sort of theatricalization of the self that is ill earned because there has been no essential self established for Crusoe.6 Such a posture of reflexive looking-on (we see this stance also in Crusoe’s regal play-acting in his island home) characterizes the highly charged emotional moments of the narrative, in which one finds Crusoe standing a bit beside himself, displaced, as it were, in a constellation characteristic of schizophrenics,7 looking critically or in embarrassment at scenes of emotional intensity or engaging in thoroughgoing acts of transposition that distance these events as far as possible from the self as he can manage.8 In such scenes (as in Friday’s reunion with his father), there is no ‘organic’ endorsement by Defoe, as much as Crusoe insists that he is moved. The body’s role in this enterprise of heart and soul is complex: denied the dignity of emotionality, it has no real way of reaching upward, except by grotesque gestures that Crusoe repudiates; hence man’s only strategies for introspection are those of dislocation, in which, however, the self looks on voyeuristically at the doings of its own body or those of others and retreats in embarrassment or horror at the spectacle. It is this failure of the body actively and coherently to participate in the novel’s main spiritual and emotional events that marks Defoe’s idea of the self as split between body and soul and that divides Crusoe from a truly imaginative connection with a world that is in fact potentially charged with meaning for him. In the sixth year of his solitude, just prior to his near-fateful circumnavigation of his domain, Crusoe refers offhandedly to his situation on the island as ‘my Reign, or my Captivity, which you please’ (100). This remark is followed by a dramatization of the interchangeability of these two states: Crusoe’s excursion results in a literal and metaphorical loss of bearings, as the current carries him out to sea, to a freedom that is not enfranchising, and from which he desires and receives a ‘Reprieve’ (102) and ‘Deliverance’ (103) in the form of a return to his ‘desert’ prison. Crusoe’s seemingly perpetual movement between freedom and constraint (the definitions of which states are here pointedly called into question) provides both the impetus for Defoe’s narrative and the substance of its allegorical theme. Crusoe’s youthful urge to ‘shake himself free’ of both his father’s injunctions and those values of ‘Ease and Pleasure’ (4) that define the ‘middle State’ (5) is clearly a prerequisite for Defoe’s tale. For Crusoe to acquiesce in such a life – one marked by ‘Temperance, Moderation, Quietness, Health, Society, all agreeable Diversions, and all desirable Pleasures’ (5) – would mean the end of Defoe’s story, which moves forward precisely by means of a negation of such goals, through an enumeration and narrative valuing of those ‘Calamities … Disasters … and … Vicissitudes’ (5) that Crusoe’s father associates negatively with other stations of life. Thus,

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Crusoe as dramatic agent undoes the message of his own narrative, repudiating by his actions the tranquillity that is associated with the rightful relinquishment of the self to God’s will and that Crusoe later insists he has attained on his island (104–5). From one point of view, Defoe controls this contradiction: the young Crusoe’s attempts to ‘shake off’ and ‘break loose from’ his father’s precepts and his own resolutions to reform are gestures leading not as much to liberation or cure as to an illusory freedom. Crusoe, in fact, ‘activated,’ is at his least powerful in the early stages of his tale. He is repeatedly cast in the role of a pawn, a being acting (or reacting) mechanically, without will: he goes to Hull ‘casually, and without any Purpose of making an Elopement that time’ (7); repeatedly, he is ‘push’d … on’ (12), ‘carryed … away’ (13), ‘hurried … into’ (13), unable to resist (12) situations that he believes he initiates in an autonomous and rebellious way.9 Heaven, however, as his sea-comrade’s father sonorously reminds him, is evidently in command, and Crusoe’s refusal to regard this truth is a mark of his spiritual immaturity. ‘Resignation to the Will of God’ (96) – the subsuming of the self’s desires and the body’s actions into a larger and more theologically correct scheme – will mark the apex of Crusoe’s spiritual enlightenment and complexly conflate subjection and freedom (or depolarize them), and though such an event may raise concerns about Defoe’s notion of the autonomous self, it is in keeping with the Puritan idea of man’s proper relationship to God. Heaven, even in this early stage of Crusoe’s career, is seen as punitive and arrestive: it is a ‘Hand’ that ‘overtakes’ him (7, 13, 15), that insists on the self’s inability to define itself through a simple rejection of spiritual, social, and familial values (for what Crusoe hopes to gain by his leaving his Father’s house is not made entirely clear). Indeed, the course of Crusoe’s life throughout the novel sees him returning obsessively and helplessly to that ‘middle State’ that was his bane. ‘I was gotten into an Employment,’ Crusoe remarks of his activities in the Brasils, ‘quite remote to my Genius, and directly contrary to the Life I delighted in, and for which I forsook my Father’s House, and broke thro’ all his good Advice; nay, I was coming into the very Middle Station, or upper Degree of low Life, which my Father advised me to before; and which if I resolved to go on with, I might as well ha’ staid at Home, and never have fatigu’d my self in the World as I had done’ (27). The constraint of freedom (and the freedom of constraint), a theme that appears frequently in conjunction with active characters in early eighteenthcentury fiction, grows more problematic when it becomes implicated in the novel’s structure. Crusoe may actively resist a biblical reading of his early deeds, which might cast him as the Prodigal Son (7, 12) – and that attempt to disburden himself from a scriptural view of the self is a sign both of his youth and

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of his immature notion of freedom – but later he willingly equates himself with Job and Elijah, and Defoe implicitly links him with Jonah, Ezekiel, and Moses.10 But, in fact, when Crusoe finally returns to his homeland, there is no longer a father there to greet him; the association with Job is similarly inexact. As Maddox has written of Crusoe, ‘there is something left over, a residue of fact that his interpretation does not account for’ (45). Crusoe and his novel struggle out of typological readings only to fall into new ones; narrative stasis sets in, which must for the sake of dramatic interest be overcome, and the pattern creates a sensation of discordance and bondage that appears to work against Defoe’s spiritual message. Part of the difficulty in attempting to balance the ideological and mimetic claims of Defoe’s narrative (those claims of the spirit and those of the body) lies in Defoe’s concerns about the relationship of ‘moral’ (spiritual application) to ‘story’ (embodied drama) in his fiction. The notion that fiction must serve some ‘higher good’ is repeatedly voiced in his prefaces: the editor of Robinson Crusoe notes that Crusoe’s ‘Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them (viz.) … to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence’ (3). ‘Story’ under this reading (as for Bunyan) serves as vehicle to a superior truth, as route of access to that ‘History of [spiritual and epistemological] Fact’ (3) that is narrative’s proper province. Defoe’s explanation of his method becomes more elaborate with each sequel to Robinson Crusoe. The laboured terms in the preface to Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, in which he discusses the relationship of the ‘real story’ (xii) or ‘real history’ (xii) to the ‘represented’ story (or the ‘imaginary story’ [xii], the ‘parable or allegoric history’ [xii]), show Defoe’s anxiety about the propriety of mixing the ‘real’ and the ‘not real’11 and his defensive tone and repetitions suggest a relationship of hostility between the mimetic and ideological strains of his work: ‘the story, though allegorical, is also historical; and … it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes, and of a variety not to be met with in the world, sincerely adapted to, and intended for the common good of mankind, and designed at first, as it is now farther applied, to the most serious uses possible’ (ix). Telling here is how Defoe’s insistence on truth seems periodically to grow more vague, the range of its definition more wide. (The island story, a ‘representation’ [ix], an ‘emblem’ [x], is later called ‘borrowed lights’ [x], an ‘allusion’ [xii] to a real story, then in the same breath, ‘historical and true in fact’ [xi], ‘word for word a history of what happened’ [xii].) Indeed, the relationship between moral and fable (Defoe’s terms, Preface to Serious Reflections ix) is clearly one of reclamation, as if some sinful union is being expiated by marriage. Defoe writes accordingly in the preface to The

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Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) that the religious application of incidents ‘legitimate[s]’ (Robinson Crusoe 239) the invented parts of the story; in the preface to Roxana he notes similarly that the ‘Inferences’ drawn by the narrator abundantly ‘justifie’ her account of her wickedness (2). This relationship of indenture and guilt is also invoked in the preface to Moll Flanders, where, however, Defoe draws breezier distinctions between ‘Moral’ and ‘Fable,’ ‘Application’ and ‘Relation’ (2),12 and speaks with more gusto about their tension: ‘the Moral ‘tis hop’d will keep the Reader serious, even where the Story might incline him to be otherwise’ (2). Editor and reader are repeatedly enjoined to ‘apply’ and ‘infer,’ as if the two levels of Defoe’s story – the mimetic and the moral – exist on parallel planes, from which they regard each other with a faintly utilitarian air. It is clear from Defoe’s prefaces – as from the narratives themselves, which often enact this same struggle between desire and dutifulness in a social or religious milieu – that Defoe finds ‘Story’ seductive, that a relationship of chastening and tension exists between the dramatic and moral parts of his tales.13 Crusoe himself alludes to such a bifurcation of vision as he discusses the need to ‘[work his] Mind up’ to ‘Resignation to the Will of God’ (96), to ‘be able to make my Sence of God’s Goodness to me,’ to ‘make a just Improvement of these things’ (97). And such inferences are duly drawn. But because the ‘superior text’ (Damrosch 210) is rarely intrinsically tied to the mimetic narrative, Crusoe’s gestures upward come off as erratic and perfunctory. Marx, Stephen, and others have spoken with contempt about Defoe’s religious intentions, dismissing them as formulaic or inert. In Everett Zimmerman’s shrewd analysis, ‘Robinson Crusoe is highly allusive; yet the references to things outside the book do not lead to expanded meanings’ (Defoe and the Novel 43). ‘The narrative,’ in Damrosch’s words, ‘offers itself as autonomous and freestanding, and in a profound sense it is secular … [T]he story tends to roll onward with a momentum of its own rather than successfully embodying the pattern to which it aspires’ (210).14 Damrosch’s figure of an unguided narrative – the suggestion that Defoe’s story ‘writes itself,’ or unfolds without an author consistently at the helm (or brakes) – is attributable largely to the attention allocated to the circumstantial in Defoe’s tale. This notion of an autonomous narrative that dominates its author (rather than vice versa) is a view of the novel that recurs in much of the provocative late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentary on Defoe’s narrative style. ‘The facts,’ wrote Leslie Stephen, discussing Defoe’s use of details, ‘tell the story of themselves, without any demand for romantic power to press them home to us’ (‘De Foe’s Novels’ 39). ‘His characters take shape and substance of their own accord,’ observed Virginia Woolf, ‘as if in despite of the author and not altogether to his liking. He never lingers or stresses any

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point of subtlety or pathos, but presses on imperturbably as if they came there without his knowledge’ (‘Defoe’ 127). In the words of W.C. Roscoe, reviewing Bohn’s 1854–5 edition of Defoe’s works, Defoe ‘never drops his subject for an instant to take it up again at a more interesting point; he tracks it like a slot-hound, with his nose close to the ground, through every bend and winding’ (395). Defoe’s inattention and overattention are curiously equated in such critiques, as if Defoe, in being too ‘dogged,’ ignores or misses what he is doing on a larger scale. Such concentration on the trees rather than the forest (often referred to as Defoe’s ‘microscopic’ or ‘concentrated’ style, [Mackay] 459; Minto 157) results in narratives that are baggy and endless, seemingly accelerated yet ‘unsteered.’ ‘All Defoe’s novels, long as they are,’ wrote novelist and essayist J. Cordy Jeaffreson, ‘are but a string of separate anecdotes related of one person, but having no other connection with each other. In no one of them are there forces at work that necessitate the conclusion of the story at a certain point. One meets with no mystery, no denouement in them. They go on and on, (usually at a brisk pace, with abundance of dramatic positions) till it apparently strikes the author he has written a good bookful, and then he winds up with a page and a half of ‘so he lived happily all the rest of his days;’ intermixed with some awkward moralizing by way of apology for the looseness of the bulk of the work. For example, “Roxana” might as well have been twice or half as long as it is’ (70).15 Defoe’s prose reflects a similar lack of ‘ranking’ and subordination, sweeping the reader into a rhetorical world of ‘heaped up clauses suggest[ing] the mind-numbing inconsequentiality of experience’ (Damrosch 211). Nearly all readers of Defoe comment on his ‘circuitous, and periphrastic’ style (the adjectives are Scott’s, ‘Daniel Defoe’ 175). E. Anthony James has described Defoe’s prose as ‘rushing,’ ‘characterized by breathless amplifications, qualifications and asides which produce such a glut of information that he loses sight not only of the point of his sentence but also of any grammatical avenue of escape from it’ (74). In his compulsive refutation of the Ciceronian sentence, which tends to attribute value to endings, Defoe, in Furbank and Owens’s analysis, systematically postpones the finales of his utterances, keeping them in such flux that any notion of wholeness, or of satisfaction gained from experiencing the resolution of claims implicit in the sentence from its beginning, is absent from his prose. Furbank and Owens call this Defoe’s ‘improvisatory’ style. What ‘strikes one,’ they write of a passage from An Essay Upon Projects, ‘is, how the passage keeps taking a new lease of life – seems again and again to be reaching its conclusion and then, with perfect but unexpected logic, manages to postpone its end’ (159). The result is not formlessness, but delay and postponement, a rhetorical environment in which authorial supervision or decision making appears

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drastically minimized. Crusoe’s description of the natives bringing water during his expedition with Xury is a humorous case in point: ‘They call’d immediately to some of their Friends, and there came two Women and brought a great Vessel made of Earth, and burnt as I suppose in the Sun; this they set down for me, as before, and I sent Xury on Shore with my Jarrs, and filled them all three: The Women were as stark Naked as the Men’ (24). The sentence-units seem, in other words, to take on a life of their own, to spawn new thoughts as they proceed,16 and to be under no particular compunction to censor themselves: All this Labour I was at the Expence of, purely from my Apprehensions on the Account of the Print of a Man’s Foot which I had seen; for as yet I never saw any human Creature come near the Island, and I had now liv’d two Years under these Uneasinesses, which indeed made my life much less comfortable than it was before; as may well be imagin’d by any who know what it is to live in the constant Snare of the Fear of Man; and this I must observe with Grief too, that the Discomposure of my Mind had too great impressions also upon the religious Part of my Thoughts, for the Dread and Terror of falling into the Hands of Savages and Canibals, lay so upon my Spirits, that I seldom found my self in a due Temper for application to my Maker, at least not with the sedate Calmness and Resignation of Soul which I was wont to do; I rather pray’d to God as under great Affliction and Pressure of Mind, surrounded with Danger, and in Expectation every Night of being murther’d and devour’d before Morning; and I must testify from my Experience, that a Temper of Peace, Thankfulness, Love and Affection, is much more the proper Frame for Prayer than that of Terror and Discomposure; and that under the Dread of Mischief impending, a Man is no more fit for a comforting Performance of the Duty of praying to God, than he is for Repentance on a sick Bed: For these Discomposures affect the Mind as the others do the Body; and the Discomposure of the Mind must necessarily be as great a Disability as that of the Body, and much greater, Praying to God being properly an Act of the Mind, not of the Body. But to go on … (118–19)

A sentence of this kind does not so much rush as wander, leaving the reader in an interesting syntactic slough without signposts or guidance. The reader’s experience of ‘process’ at such moments, as Furbank and Owens have suggested, works against a notion of direction or ending that subtly refutes an allegorical (‘teleological’) reading of Crusoe’s story.17 Such rhetorical disloyalty to the ideological cause is exacerbated by two other peculiarities of Defoe’s style: his penchant for ‘false adversatives’ (a feature of Defoe’s speech discussed by Rogers, Robinson Crusoe 121–2; see also H.O. Brown 584) and the work’s anti-metaphorical bent. Both of these stylistic idi-

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osyncrasies create an atmosphere of hostility towards the type of interpretative reading Defoe appears to purvey in his preface. Both entrench the reader on the ‘lower’ level of Defoe’s narrative, entrapping him in Defoe’s apparently directionless (or ‘overdirected’) circumstantiality. According to Rogers, Defoe’s use of ‘false adversatives’ reflects a rhetorical ‘attempt to impart drama to an event or tension to an internal debate by using expressions of contrariety where they [are] not necessary or logical’ (Robinson Crusoe 121). In such instances, adversatives like ‘but’ and ‘yet’ replace connectives like ‘and’ and ‘so,’ ‘impart[ing] motion and conflict where there is only mild puzzlement’ (122). Crusoe’s description of his waking to his own name is a case in point: I was so dead asleep at first, being fatigu’d with Rowing, or Paddling, as it is call’d, the first Part of the Day, and with walking the latter Part, that I did not wake thoroughly, but dozing between sleeping and waking, thought I dream’d that some Body spoke to me: But as the Voice continu’d to repeat Robin Crusoe, Robin Crusoe, at last I began to wake more perfectly, and was at first dreadfully frighted, and started up in the utmost Consternation: But no sooner were my Eyes open, than I saw my Poll sitting on the Top of the Hedge. (104)

The unusual preponderance of adversatives in descriptions such as this one creates a narrative texture of vague tension, infusing into Crusoe’s descriptions of his actions and environment a sense of anxiety that is perhaps more unsettling because it is not logical or overt. If the reader registers on any level a sense of the narrator’s misleadingness or imprecision, his trust in the work’s narrative autonomy is further eroded. Against this curiously shifting ground, more solid footing seems offered by Defoe’s attention to detail, to objects, to facts, to those aspects of experience that have ‘Solidity, Extension, Figure’ (Locke ii.viii. ¶ 9, 135). (Note also Van Ghent’s oft-quoted remark on the importance in Moll Flanders of the ‘counting, measuring, pricing, weighing, and evaluating of … things’ [35].) This aspect of Defoe’s style has been commented upon since serious critical study of his work began. Scott praised Defoe’s ‘power of exact and circumstantial delineation’ (‘Daniel Defoe’ 179) and compared his fiction to the paintings of Flemish artists (179–80). ‘There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it,’ wrote Charles Lamb. ‘… It is like reading evidence in a court of Justice’ (quoted in W. Wilson 3: 428). Discussions of Defoe’s verisimilitude and ‘exactness’ recur in various tones of bewilderment, delight, and disgust throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘He can imitate the matter-of-fact precision of a scientific traveller,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, discussing the defects of Defoe’s fiction, ‘until we wonder that his pen could trace or his brain conceive what

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has not even the excuse of truth to soften its dryness’ (‘Defoe’ 129). Hippolyte Taine’s assessment of Defoe’s realism points to the shortcomings and strengths of his representational enterprise: His imagination was that of a man of business, not of an artist, crammed and, as it were, jammed down with facts. He tells them as they come to him, without arrangement or style, like a conversation, without dreaming of producing an effect, or composing a phrase … repeating himself at need, using the same thing two or three times, not seeming to imagine that there are methods of amusing, touching, engrossing, or pleasing, with no desire but to pour out on paper the fulness of the information with which he is charged. Even in fiction his information is as precise as in history … It seems as though our author had performed all Crusoe’s labours, so exactly does he describe them, with numbers, quantities, dimensions, like a carpenter, potter, or an old tar. Never was such a sense of the real before or since … [W]e cannot imagine [Taine concludes] that such and such a detail, so minute, so dull, is invented; an inventor would have suppressed it. (3: 260–1)

How Defoe achieves his realism, and how it should be evaluated, are persistent topics in criticism on Defoe. Macaulay’s assessment in 1858 is one that has many modern supporters: ‘He had undoubtedly a knack at making fiction look like truth. But is such a knack much to be admired? … I have seen dead game painted in such a way that I thought the partridges and pheasants real; but surely such pictures do not rank high as works of art’ (Trevelyan 2: 383). De Quincey speaks suggestively of the ‘self-verifying’ quality of Defoe’s descriptions, attributing their realistic air to the lack of resonance of their details, to their ‘inertness of effect’ (755). The reader, in such an apparently authorless or inartistic universe (‘like a carpenter, potter, or an old tar’ [Taine 3: 260]; the circumstances seem to ‘verify themselves’[De Quincey 755]), loses the greater in favour of the smaller picture, interested in, never agitated by (in Coleridge’s famous observation, Lecture XI 194) the tale in which he is (somewhat scientifically) engaged. Therein lie, peculiarly, both Defoe’s failing and his ‘charm’ (Coleridge, Lecture XI 194), and the enigma of his ‘magnetism’ (Kronenberger 9). ‘To invent,’ as De Quincey described Defoe’s verisimilitude, ‘when nothing at all is gained by inventing, there seems no imaginable temptation. It never occurs to us, that this very construction of the case, this very inference from such neutral details, was precisely the object which De Foe had in view’ (755). Rogers, similarly, discusses the element of ‘noise’ in Defoe’s descriptions, his attention to irrelevant details that contributes to our sense of the independence of his text (Robinson Crusoe viii). Defoe’s managerial role under such readings appears so minimized as to threaten his claims as an artist. De Quinc-

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ey and Taine note Defoe’s strange ‘disappearance’ from his texts; Coleridge describes a readerly stance – bemused but emotionally uninvolved – that essentially reproduces the offhand posture of Defoe towards his own fiction. The very neutrality of Defoe’s details seems at once to validate his text and sweep its author aside. ‘He does not, finally,’ writes Mark Schorer, ‘judge his material, as a novelist must’ (287). Christopher Gray’s study of Defoe’s imagination suggests, indeed, a rhetorical and representational program of disenfranchisement that is actively anti-imaginative, that operates to divest objects and events of ‘larger’ significance.18 Gray describes a technique that is insistently reductive, that minimizes and concentrates the reader’s attention in an effort to ‘protect the integrity of objects from being invested with metaphorical significance’ (72).19 Defoe, accordingly, engages in a project of literalization, a stripping away and reducing of an object’s ‘reverberative’ elements, until he attains that quality of flatness or ‘inertness’ (De Quincey 755)20 that is repeatedly associated with his style. The technique is not just ametaphorical, but anti-metaphorical, anti-imaginative, as in instances in which Defoe literalizes metaphoric utterances about slavery or working for one’s daily bread. Such literalizations are often delivered punitively, as if in revenge for flippant figurative speech. Crusoe’s complaint in the Brasils, that he ‘liv’d just like a Man cast away upon some desolate Island, that had no body there but himself’ (27) is accordingly literalized with a vengeance, as this slip of the tongue costs him some twentyeight years of the real thing. It is not so much that there is a tension between the metaphoric and the literal as that they seem unable in Defoe’s descriptive passages to co-exist. Here is one of Crusoe’s reports of his salvage expeditions from the ship: I had the biggest Maggazin of all Kinds now that ever were laid up, I believe, for one Man, but I was not satisfy’d still; for while the Ship sat upright in that Posture, I thought I ought to get every Thing out of her that I could; so every Day at low Water I went on Board, and brought away some Thing or other: But particularly the third Time I went, I brought away as much of the Rigging as I could, as also all the small Ropes and Rope-twine I could get, with a Piece of spare Canvass, which was to mend the Sails upon Occasion, the Barrel of wet Gunpowder: In a Word, I brought away all the Sails first and last, only that I was fain to cut them in Pieces, and bring as much at a Time as I could; for they were no more useful to be Sails, but as meer Canvass only. (42)

Such a description exhibits a lateral lingering on details for their own sake, an agreeable expansiveness (emphasized by the connectives, ‘as also,’ ‘with,’ ‘and,’ and by the explanatory clauses opening with ‘which,’ ‘only,’ and ‘for,’

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that modify and elaborate on Crusoe’s activities) that draws out the narrative time allocated for the event and validates the matter with which Crusoe works. The incidents of the novel seem thereby charged with a significance of their own, one that arises from and is contained by them, for they allude to no higher scheme. Crusoe’s desire to ‘get more’ out of the ship does not offer itself up for laborious evaluation by the reader in any particular fashion (unless by postcolonial critics concerned by Crusoe’s rapacious plundering), because it is not highlighted or ‘judged’ (Schorer’s term, 287) in any overt – or even covert – way by Defoe. Hence the oddly pleasurable experience in rereading Robinson Crusoe of noticing curious details that one has previously passed over, details that contribute subliminally to a sense of verisimilitude or to the ‘density’ of Crusoe’s world but that (in their ‘unsifted’ state) do not lure one to ‘apply’ them outside their initial frame of reference. (Surely, for example, it would be stretching credulity to suggest that there is a biblical resonance to ‘the third time.’) Defoe’s use of ‘approximating and alternative counts’ (Rogers, Robinson Crusoe 122) (a deliberate imprecision in counting or enumerating, which Rogers views as characteristically Defoeian, for example, ‘two or three Bags full of Nails and Spikes … a Dozen or two of Hatchets’ [41], ‘two or three Razors … some ten or a Dozen of good Knives and Forks’ [43]) similarly discourages close reading even while pretending to be ‘close.’ (Surely Crusoe knows whether he has found twelve or twenty-four hatchets, and surely this is not ‘important’ to the narrative in any way.) Such rhetorical and descriptive strategies, coupled with Crusoe’s tendency to shuffle in naming the objects of his world (‘a Shovel or Spade’ [54], ‘a Thing like a Hodd’ [55], ‘Entrance or Door’ [44], ‘Cave or Vault’ [55], ‘Pestle or Beater’ [89]),21 create an atmosphere of marked density in the early island passages and position Crusoe against his environment as he attempts to assert linguistic control over a world that never fully responds to his attempts to master it. (For example, Crusoe’s shovel must be something ‘between’ a shovel and a spade, accurately describable by neither term.) It is repeatedly the material aspects of this world (the terrain, the weather, Crusoe’s handmade tools and furniture) that are not amenable to Crusoe’s ‘old’ language, that resist Crusoe, that create a sense of independence and impenetrability (despite Crusoe’s linguistic advances upon them) that Tournier, in his recasting of Defoe’s story, associates with the island’s autonomy and Crusoe’s sceptical, deadening gaze. Throughout the first section of Robinson Crusoe in particular, Defoe’s rhetorical tactics confer a sense of solidity upon Crusoe’s island domain that makes it appear unusually resistant to penetration, linguistically and conceptually: false adversatives and compulsive (though imprecise) mensuration, a program of literalization that ‘divests [figures of speech] of their figurative

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meanings’ (Gray 70), a retreat from true aggregation by allowing details a ‘life of their own.’ With such excessive narrative value attributed to the ‘real’ world, flights to a ‘higher’ narrative format (as Swift, too, will find) seem contrived, and Defoe’s abandonment of the language and style of the concrete and the particular at such moments reinforces the sense of schism many readers have noticed in passages in which such flights occur. At their most extreme, Defoe’s allusive gestures (to the trials of Job, for example) are bereft of pith because they are not validated by the techniques and values of his ‘anterior’ text. As Damrosch has argued, Crusoe joins Defoe in paying homage to that text, but the secular value and vigour of his experience never require bolstering by such a text (210). Indeed, as in Moll Flanders, discordant ‘breaks’ in the narrative mark the moral passages as interpolations or even interruptions: ‘but I must go on with the Historical Part of Things,’ notes Crusoe, after a long interlude on Friday’s enlightenment, ‘and take every Part in its order’ (160). Throughout the novel Crusoe’s spiritual lessons tend less frequently to be enacted (with the exception of his general situation as castaway) than to be presented in a language and style markedly different from the dramatic parts of his story: I then reflected [records Crusoe after the episode of the footprint] that God, who was not only Righteous but Omnipotent, as he had thought fit thus to punish and afflict me, so he was able to deliver me; that if he did not think fit to do it, ‘twas my unquestion’d Duty to resign my self absolutely and entirely to his Will: and on the other Hand, it was my Duty also to hope in him, pray to him, and quietly to attend the Dictates and Directions of his daily Providence. (114)

Vanished here are the careful (if inexact) correlates of space and time; in their places are the abstract language of religious duty, the summoning of the self to a more general, uncircumstantial sphere. Such a shift is entirely in keeping with the book’s theme of religious awakening: Crusoe’s wooden ‘Kalander’ (48) limits his view to his earthly life, just as his ‘map’ of the island’s interior charts only one of the domains he inhabits. Crusoe’s dream of the avenging angel is presented more concretely, yet even here we feel the push towards a symbolic typology that discounts the particular and the unique: I thought, that I was sitting on the Ground on the Outside of my Wall, where I sat when the Storm blew after the Earthquake, and that I saw a Man descend from a great black Cloud, in a bright Flame of Fire, and light upon the Ground: He was all over as bright as a Flame, so that I could but just bear to look towards him; his Countenance was most inexpressibly dreadful, impossible for Words to describe;

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when he stepp’d upon the Ground with his Feet, I thought the Earth trembl’d, just as it had done before in the Earthquake, and all the Air look’d, to my Apprehension, as if it had been fill’d with Flashes of Fire. (64–5)

On the previous day, Crusoe has recorded the state of his (bodily) health and his activities: ‘June 26. Better; and having no Victuals to eat, took my Gun, but found my self very weak; however I kill’d a She-Goat, and with much Difficulty got it Home, and broil’d some of it, and eat; I wou’d fain have stew’d it, and made some Broath, but had no Pot’ (64). The attention to things (victuals, gun, goat, pot) dominates this account, as does Defoe’s wonderfully divagatory syntax, as he follows the branching and weighing of Crusoe’s thoughts (‘and … but … however … and … and … but’), compulsively recording the impossible alternatives to his actions even as he undertakes others, and the psychic and physical limitations that receive emphasis in the syntactical ‘boost’ of ‘however’ and ‘with much Difficulty’ and ‘fain.’ This is Defoe’s ‘tracking’ (Roscoe’s term, 395), a rhetorical characteristic that reveals a valuing of close recording and detail for their own sake and that concentrates the reader’s attention in such a way that, when the angel descends in the dream, it requires an adjustment of vision that may result in an initial ‘blurring’ (‘impossible for Words to describe … impossible to express the Terror … No one … will expect [Crusoe reiterates] that I should be able to describe’ the horrors of the dream [64–5]). Defoe’s narrative insistence on the value of the physical world and the moral imperative that Crusoe look upward to find true meaning may indeed be unresolvable, effectively leaving Crusoe stranded between two conflicting domains. It is as if the world of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in which natural events are suffused with allegorical meaning, has been turned inside out or carefully separated in some way, and here is where the larger imaginative dilemma of Defoe’s novel occurs and where the novel as genre will necessarily train much of its later ideological and stylistic energy. To gesture towards a higher scheme (rhetorically or structurally) is not to knit the two together. Such a bridge could occur (as it does in Tournier’s revision of Crusoe) through the imagination – that arena of the mind in which subject and object join in fruitful commerce. But Crusoe’s imaginings on the island tend to be either pathological, proprietary, or dull (his dream of the avenging angel, his figurative castings of his island into the various realms of his political domain, his prophetic dream of Friday), largely because his own higher resources seem not to be engaged by the island in any compelling way. It is not so much, as Woolf remarked (‘“Robinson Crusoe’” 58), that Crusoe does not have an aesthetic ‘appreciation’ of his island but that, accorded an insufficient grasp of an interior, responding self, Crusoe’s attitude towards his environment is necessarily militaristic, orienting

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him against his world in a posture of aggressive self-protection in a situation in which the self is insufficiently formulated or known.22 Such a stance of paranoia explains the rawness of Crusoe’s distinction between what is and what might have been in the famous formulation of what might have happened had Crusoe not gotten the tools out of the ship: I spent whole Hours, I may say whole Days [Crusoe remarks], in representing to my self in the most lively Colours, how I must have acted, if I had got nothing out of the Ship. How I could not have so much as got any Food, except Fish and Turtles; and that as it was long before I found any of them, I must have perish’d first. That I should have liv’d, if I had not perish’d, like a meer Savage. That if I had kill’d a Goat, or a Fowl, by any Contrivance, I had no way to flea or open them, or part the Flesh from the Skin, and the Bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my Teeth, and pull it with my Claws like a Beast. These Reflections [he then intones abstractly] made me very sensible of the Goodness of Providence to me, and very thankful for my present Condition. (95)

The melodrama of this passage, with its forced amplifications and parallelisms (‘whole Hours, I may say whole Days … how I must have acted … How I could not have … got any Food … That I should have liv’d … That if I had killed’), suggests a view of the self that is laboured: despite Defoe’s clever use of ‘Claws’ at the end of the passage to suggest Crusoe’s (suppositional) collapse into bestiality, the syntax of the passage belies that possibility. Crusoe’s compulsive movement here through refuted premises (‘I could not have … got any Food, except Fish and Turtles … I must have perish’d first … I should have liv’d, if I had not perish’d, like a meer Savage … if I had kill’d a Goat, or a Fowl’) suggests quite the opposite of what he is here maintaining: he cannot conceive of himself as being so unresourceful as not to survive. Thus, this ‘anti-portrait’ rings true only in theory: it has technological verity – it explains Crusoe’s (and Defoe’s) celebration of tools – but its psychological truth is far less certain. What ensues from this perhaps largely hypothetical threat of spiritual and physical regression, as many critics have noted, are elaborate strategies of bodily defence, upon which Defoe lavishes much narrative attention and detail, as if protection of the body staved off in some way violation or collapse of an inner self (though how or if such a ‘self’ is construed is not in fact entirely clear). On his first night on the island Crusoe carries with him up the tree ‘a short Stick, like a Truncheon’ (36); on the second night he sleeps ‘barricado’d … round with … Chests and Boards’ (40); and when, on the third night, he reclines in his tent with the empty chests and casks encircling it and with ‘two Pistols just at my Head, and my Gun at Length by me’ (42), he has established

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the prototype of his island boudoir. By the time he sees the remains of the cannibal feast on the shore, he occupies a heavily fortified ‘Castle,’ double-walled and fitted with guns: I had now a double Wall, and my outer Wall was thickned with Pieces of Timber, old Cables, and every Thing I could think of, to make it strong; having in it seven little Holes, about as big as I might put my Arm out at: In the In-side of this, I thickned my Wall to above ten Foot thick, with continual bringing Earth out of my Cave, and laying it at the Foot of the Wall, and walking upon it; and through the seven Holes, I contriv’d to plant the Musquets, of which I took Notice, that I got seven on Shore out of the Ship; these, I say, I planted like my Cannon, and fitted them into Frames that held them like a Carriage, that so I could fire all the seven Guns in two Minutes Time: This Wall I was many a weary Month a finishing, and yet never thought my self safe till it was done. (117)

Despite the emphasis in this and related passages on intactness, on Crusoe’s delineation in no uncertain terms of the barriers between what he knows and has mastered and what he fears,23 Crusoe’s awareness of his own body is strangely limited and distanced. The rare physical descriptions he delivers of himself are flippant, embarrassed, or ironic; if he is not engaged in the manufacture of an object or the performance of a task (in which instance Defoe’s attention is focused on the object or the activity being mastered, his lavish descriptions of his walls being a case in point), Crusoe portrays himself as helpless (as a body overcome by sickness, by the sea) or absurd. Just before the episode of the footprint, Crusoe tellingly delivers the first view of his ‘Figure’: I had a great high shapeless Cap, made of a Goat’s Skin, with a Flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the Sun from me, as to shoot the Rain off from running into my Neck; nothing being so hurtful in these Climates, as the Rain upon the Flesh under the Cloaths. I had a short Jacket of Goat-Skin, the Skirts coming down to about the middle of my Thighs; and a Pair of open-knee’d Breeches of the same, the Breeches were made of the Skin of an old He-goat, whose Hair hung down such a Length on either Side, that like Pantaloons it reach’d to the middle of my Legs; Stockings and Shoes I had none, but had made me a Pair of somethings, I scarce know what to call them, like Buskins to flap over my Legs, and lace on either Side like Spatter-dashes; but of a most barbarous Shape, as indeed were all the rest of my Cloaths. (108–9)

This description (which continues for an additional long paragraph wherein

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Crusoe describes, among other things, his belts, ammunition, umbrella, and moustache) is strangely dry and detached, verging on the parodic (is Defoe suggesting that Crusoe has ‘gone native’? Is he ‘monstrous’? Why is his description of himself almost exclusively sartorial?),24 as if Crusoe’s body is a thing as remote from his knowledge as an ironwood tree. The questions that the passage raises, as with his portrait of himself as beast – and indeed, as with most of the moments in the novel in which a view of the self seems as if it might be retrievable – are so patently unanswerable (because their premises may very well be false) that the reader is left pondering whether muteness or analytical ingenuity is the more appropriate critical response. And when this body (which fails to offer a key to a higher self) is energized by emotions it becomes even more unaccountable. Indeed, Crusoe in the throe of emotions tends to be histrionic, pathological, or risible. This, strangely, is perhaps where the imaginative dilemma of Defoe’s novel lies, for if the body cannot act as a successful conduit of ‘other’ energies from the heart or soul, then Crusoe can never come closer to God or to any higher level of existence than when his body is in abeyance in illness or prostration.25 As Crusoe works on the island (with the potential emblems of God’s grace), he thus may review and reorganize his world, and see its alignment to some prior text, but he cannot successfully embody that knowledge because as a corporeal being he, by definition, exists in detachment from that world of abstraction and intellection that, for Defoe, marks the higher echelon of things. When passions such as loneliness, gratitude, or empathy, which elevate man from a beast into a social or spiritual being, move Crusoe, his body reacts strangely, grotesquely. There appears to be no grace or dignity in the physical gestures that convey higher meaning: ‘I walk’d about on the Shore,’ Crusoe tells us of his first moments on the island, ‘lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I may say, wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance, making a thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe’ (35). It is perhaps merciful that Crusoe does not describe them in this instance, because when he does so the effect is inevitably bathetic and odd. Friday, for example, on seeing his father, exhibits all the antic gestures that Defoe associates with the influx of high emotion, ‘Extravagancies’ (172) of affection that send him flipping in and out of the boat and speeding off for water in the same abrupt manner as when he fell ‘a jumping and dancing’ (161) with patriotic fervour on the island’s hilltop.26 Such automaton-like leapings and cavortings are what emotion looks like ‘from the outside’ as when in Farther Adventures Crusoe describes the expressions of joy and relief in the rescued Frenchmen: It is impossible for me to express the several Gestures, the strange Extasies, the Variety of Postures which these poor deliver’d People run into, to express the

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Joy of their Souls at so unexpected a Deliverance … there were some in Tears, some raging, and tearing themselves, as if they had been in the greatest Agonies of Sorrow, some stark-raving and down-right lunatick, some ran about the Ship stamping with their Feet, others wringing their Hands; some were dancing, some singing, some laughing, more crying; many quite dumb, not able to speak a Word; others sick and vomiting, several swooning, and ready to faint; and a few were Crossing themselves, and giving God Thanks … … A Man that we saw this Minute dumb, and as it were stupid and confounded, should the next Minute be dancing and hallowing like an Antick; and the next Moment be tearing his Hair, or pulling his Clothes to Pieces, and stamping them under his Feet, like a mad Man; a few Moments after that, we should have him all in Tears, then sick, then swooning, and had not immediate Help been had, would, in a few Moments more have been dead; and thus it was not with one or two, or ten or twenty, but with the greatest Part of them; and if I remember right, our Surgeon was oblig’d to let above thirty of them Blood. (12: 127–9)27

Here is a veritable catalogue of Defoe’s pathology of the emotions: men under their sway behave theatrically, ‘extravagantly’ (as when Crusoe throws down the Bible and lifts his hands to God or when Friday presents his master with the hatchet to kill him), wastefully (as when Crusoe dashes tears from his eyes, crossly reminding himself that there was ‘little Relief in that’ [37]), or pathologically (men swoon and vomit and ‘tear themselves’ with joy). Emotional seizures, gas-like, are dangerous, and must be ‘vented’ by extravagant speech, tears, or the letting of blood. If such expulsion does not occur, emotions can overwhelm man, stupefying, paralyzing, even annihilating him.28 Crusoe’s reaction to the cannibal feast is a case in point. Amazement and confusion, gorgon-like, initially arrest his expressive powers: I was so astonish’d with the Sight of these Things, that I entertain’d no Notions of any Danger to my self from it for a long while; All my Apprehensions were bury’d in the Thoughts of such a Pitch of inhuman, hellish Brutality, and the Horror of the Degeneracy of Humane Nature; which though I had heard of often, yet I never had so near a View of before; in short, I turn’d away my Face from the horrid Spectacle; my Stomach grew sick, and I was just at the Point of Fainting, when Nature discharg’d the Disorder from my Stomach, and having vomited with an uncommon Violence, I was a little reliev’d; but cou’d not bear to stay in the Place a Moment; so I got me up the Hill again, with all the Speed I cou’d, and walk’d on towards my own Habitation. (120)

There seems no particular morality to the emotionalized body in such instanc-

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es: influxes of surprise and gratitude need to be evacuated in the same way as those of horror: It is impossible to express here the Flutterings of my very Heart [writes Crusoe at the receipt of his goods in Lisbon], when I look’d over these Letters, and especially when I found all my Wealth about me … In a Word, I turned pale, and grew sick; and had not the old Man run and fetch’d me a Cordial, I believe the sudden Surprize of Joy had overset Nature, and I had dy’d upon the Spot. Nay after that, I continu’d very ill … ‘till a Physician being sent for, and something of the real Cause of my Illness being known, he order’d me to be let Blood; after which, I had Relief, and grew well: But I verily believe, if it had not been eas’d by a Vent given in that Manner, to the Spirits, I should have dy’d. (205)

The body in such instances acts not as a channel or expressive agent for the emotions but as a vessel that seems to ‘catch’ and contain them in an unhealthy way. Crusoe describes his accesses of despair in his early days on the island: In the midst of the greatest Composures of my Mind, this would break out upon me like a Storm, and make me wring my Hands, and weep like a Child: Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my Work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the Ground for an Hour or two together; and this was still worse to me; for if I could burst out into Tears, or vent my self by Words, it would go off, and the Grief having exhausted it self would abate. (83)

Repeatedly in the novel, Crusoe’s body must rid itself of the emotions by violent physical effort. Such ‘pathologization’ of the body, its tendency to bloat with and then evacuate high feelings, suggests that, for Defoe, the ‘self’ either is not communicable in such terms or that it exists elsewhere, outside corporeal and emotional bounds, in some space not subject to physical or psychic laws. Such a template complicates and perhaps even derails Defoe’s allegorical enterprise. If the body’s chief role is simply to expel the emotions as expediently as possible, how can man expect to embody a ‘higher’ order or text, one that, furthermore, demotes the body and the world of physicality to the lowest possible level? The ‘click’ of recognition of this paradox29 occurs in such emotionally charged moments, in which Crusoe slips aside in a quasi-voyeuristic attitude towards himself, seeing himself (or others) askance as dysfunctional or puppet-like.30 This sense of infinitesimal shift mimics the movement of displacement that marks all the ‘psychological’ events of the book: the frenzied erection of walls and fortifications, the obsession with the cannibals (and their counterparts, the wolves), and, in Farther Adventures, Crusoe’s pyrotechnical

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fixation on the Tartars’ idol, which he blows to bits in an ecstasy of gunpowder and smoke. To the modern critic, these events are of paramount interest, and Eric Berne, among others, has written compellingly about Crusoe’s internal fears. The connection between displacement and eruption or explosion (Crusoe dreams of decimating the cannibals with gunpowder, he lights a train of gunpowder for the wolves, and he demolishes the pagan statue as its devotees watch in horror) is, of course, a suggestive one that hints (as Everett Zimmerman has argued) at a ‘rage within’ (Defoe and the Novel 32; see also his ‘Robinson Crusoe’ 519–29). As with Theweleit’s fascist soldiers, violent combustion may be the one permissible way to unsettle Crusoe’s unmalleable world. If displacement tends to occur when Defoe considers bodily and emotional issues in Robinson Crusoe, it is appropriate that the novel end in the theatrics – perhaps equally incendiary – of Crusoe’s political posturing on the island and the vaudeville antics of Friday and the bear in the tree. For if body and self are not intrinsically joined, the division between expression and mere gesture can no longer be clearly discerned. The body, though confusingly a part of that physical world that Crusoe so meticulously (if imprecisely) describes in Robinson Crusoe, is not celebrated with the same vigour as that world. If it serves to bridge the material and the spiritual spheres, it is not shown to be an adequate conduit through which successful intercourse between the two domains can take place. How, encumbered with a body that ‘goes off casually’ to Hull and that shuts down or shifts into a position of detachment at moments of high expressive intensity, can Crusoe hope to know himself, especially in the context of a narrative in which physical vigour is intrinsic to its own movement forward?31 It is, perhaps, fitting that Crusoe’s final versions of himself are almost exclusively textual: a series of legalistic documentations of identity (titles, wills, accounts, notarized signatures in public registers) that connect him with goods and land (though such formulations perhaps sullenly fix his identity in a world of ownership and capital). The soul’s relationship to the body, as Defoe expresses it in Serious Reflections, is one of ‘absolute mastership’ (8); ‘if the soul be truly master of itself,’ he reasons, arguing against the need for physical retirement or retreat, ‘all is safe; for it is certainly and effectually master of the body’ (6–7): ‘There is no need to prescribe the body to this or that situation; the hands, or feet, or tongue can no more disturb the retirement of the soul, than a man having money in his pocket can take it out, or pay it, or dispose of it by his hand, without his own knowledge’(7). Improper ordering of the hierarchy between soul and body results in a volatile situation resembling that of Crusoe’s gunpowder in the cave: if the mind does not stay ‘above the power or reach of [physical] allure-

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ment … the vicious desire remains, as the force remains in the gunpowder, and will exert itself whenever touched with the fire’ (8). The image is a suggestive one, delineating clearly (to the post-Freudian mind) the destructive results of disjunction and repression. And the consequences of such a schema for the artistic enterprise are grim, both for Crusoe and for Defoe: if expression does not come easily or sincerely, and anxieties about the body exist and are not externalized, technical skill (as with Frankenstein) may be unimpaired (may, indeed, be enhanced), but no true art can be created. So Crusoe on the island (a ‘radical egocentric’32 without a true sense of self) becomes a technocrat and politician of mythic stature, but never an artist.33 With a much clearer (though more distant) sense of an ideal scheme of things than has Frankenstein, Crusoe is paralyzed:34 to embrace that scheme fully is (as Watt [Rise of the Novel 74–85] and others have compellingly written) to sacrifice the autonomy essential to the making of self and art. In an ideological sense Defoe yearns for such autonomy (Crusoe’s regency on the island duplicating and embodying the will of God), yet he shrinks from an unclouded representation of self-rule. And devoid of, yet dominated by, a sense of self, Crusoe can only act theatrically. Later novelists, such as Richardson and Fielding, will solve (though in very different ways) the dilemma presented here so compellingly by Defoe. And the dilemma is as psychological as it is aesthetic. Lacking the ‘solvent power,’ as W.C. Roscoe acutely noted, Defoe has no interest in ‘the strange underlying forces and essences which [poetic] minds [such as those of Spenser and Shelley] love to contemplate as the component elements of the world … He abides in the concrete; he has no analytical perception whatever’ (389).35 And because he cannot dissolve the intellect, the will, and the ‘personal affections,’ he is similarly arrested in the trap of the self, denied that freedom that a ‘loss of self in others’ may bring (Roscoe 397).36 The inertness of the various articles of Crusoe’s manufacture on the island, in contrast to the uneasy, demiurgic project of Frankenstein, displays both the limits and the propriety of his activities as ‘creative man.’ The jars and baskets, like Crusoe’s own body (and unlike Frankenstein’s Creature), thankfully, do not express any real urge towards imaginative or idealistic autonomy. The physical does not so much, as in Frankenstein’s case, surprise and shock by its own expressiveness as it contains and channels expressiveness into mere ‘mechanick’ and rational skill.

2 Gulliver’s Travels: Shock

[My Master] had heard indeed some curious Houyhnhnms observe, that in most Herds there was a Sort of ruling Yahoo … who was always more deformed in Body, and mischievous in Disposition, than any of the rest. That, this Leader had usually a Favourite as like himself as he could get, whose Employment was to lick his Master’s Feet and Posteriors, and drive the Female Yahoos to his Kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a Piece of Ass’s Flesh. This Favourite … usually continues in Office till worse can be found; but the very Moment he is discarded, his Successor, at the Head of all the Yahoos in that District … come in a Body, and discharge their Excrements upon him from Head to Foot. But how far this might be applicable to our Courts and Favourites, and Ministers of State, my Master said I could best determine. Gulliver’s Travels

Released from the charged atmosphere of the conversion narrative – for Swift’s Gulliver seeks neither salvation nor cure – matter takes on a more deadening impact in Gulliver’s Travels, resisting, as it does throughout Swift’s oeuvre, investment in or elevation to a ‘higher’ register (of spirit, of aesthetic beauty). Such opposition to higher signification is far more active than in the work of Defoe, in which there are repeated attempts to correlate the realms of body and spirit. For Swift, such a project is by definition suspect. Gulliver’s assumption of equine manners at the end of his journeys (his imitation of the Houyhnhnms’ ‘Gait and Gesture’ [260], their ‘Voice and manner’ [260]) signals not his translation into a ‘wiser and better’ being (the aim of both the act and account of travel [272]) but a collapse of his reasoning and imaginative faculties, a crackup marked by furious certitude and allegiance to a code of behaviour that he renders in the most literal way. By the time the Travels are published, Gulliver,

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as Richard Sympson reports it, has retired to Nottinghamshire, absorbed, one assumes, in self-righteously inhaling the odour of the stables and inveighing against humankind. The picture is at once preposterous and unsettling. Gulliver’s evangelism bears all the symptoms of a fundamentalist awakening: his reading of his encounter with the Houyhnhnms is self-serving and humourless, and his attempts to transpose his experience into the ‘real’ world consist in frantically applying the vocabulary and concepts of Houyhnhnmland to situations whose complexities (domestic, political, moral) resist such categorization. Gulliver’s failure, like that of Strephon and Cassinus, Swift’s similarly stricken adventurers, stems from his inability (or unwillingness) to imagine a compromise between what is and what should be. Testing the world of the actual by criteria that do not fit it, Gulliver is doomed to disappointment and chagrin: I do in the next Place complain of my own great Want of Judgment, in being prevailed upon by the Intreaties and false Reasonings of you and some others, very much against mine own Opinion, to suffer my Travels to be published. Pray bring to your Mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on the Motive of publick Good; that the Yahoos were a Species of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect: Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions. (8)

Gulliver’s literalism in the aftermath of his travels suggests both ‘the last word’ – often absurd – that the body tends to have in Swift’s work as well as its fierce resistance to translation, an opacity that Swift invokes for comic effect but that also informs his style in a deeper – indeed, in a fundamental – way. Such opposition to a superior order of things may seem at first glance to correct the disequilibrium of Defoe’s dealings with corpus and numen, in a valorization of the material for its own physical sake. For Swift, however, the grotesqueness of the physical, its inability to incorporate a higher world of ideas and values, seen in Gulliver’s doomed attempts to yoke the two realms, spells out, proleptically, the greatest potential failure of the novelistic enterprise. Whether one argues, with Seidel and with Hunter (‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel’), that Swift’s confutation of a world that might accommodate real and ideal is aimed at undermining the emerging genre of the novel, or whether it is the hallmark of the satiric mode, the warnings implicit in Swift’s method, especially in Gulliver’s Travels, shake the foundations of a project that seeks to transpose into a physical, empirical world material of the mind or of the spirit.

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As such, Gulliver’s Travels is a pivotal work in the development of the novel, not only because Swift deliberately here toys with novelistic elements that will become central to the form (a restricted centre of consciousness, the situation of travel, attention to circumstantial detail), but also because he adopts such an emphatic stance on the limits to which the physical world may effectively embody and convey matter of lasting value. The fact that Gulliver (like his predecessor Crusoe) appears ‘novelistically’ to attempt such a project makes it a significant test case in the evolution of the genre. From the opening letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson, Gulliver’s anxieties about textual transmission and incursions (editorial invasions, corrections, and insertions)1 forecast the problems of ‘translation’ that will characterize Gulliver’s behaviour in the stables and that form the central ideological preoccupation of Swift. Though the difficulty of Gulliver’s ‘reentry’ may invoke, as certain ‘hard-school’ critics have argued, the disorienting effects of the return to Plato’s cave (by which reading Gulliver is not an absurd but a tragic figure), it is clear that a superficial assumption of manners and mores (trotting, whinnying, neighing) does not recreate the utopia that Gulliver longs for any more than parading the Houyhnhnms’ virtues with a devotee’s ardour effects national reform. Indeed, such behaviour contributes only to isolate Gulliver further from the world of humankind that is Swift’s deepest concern, casting him as a stubborn proselytizer for a system that does not ‘fit’ the fallen world of which he is a citizen. Gulliver’s misanthropy and hysteria – his preference for his horses and groom over his family – coupled with his self-centredness and his inability to tolerate incursions into his text and space suggest how arduous it is for him to conjoin real and ideal in any constructive way. It is thus not surprising that he has, as he tells his Cousin Sympson, thrown up his ‘visionary Schemes’ (10), turning his energy instead towards furious diatribes and tracts. Indeed, as for Strephon after his odyssey through Celia’s dressing room, the contact of ideal and real is explosive and paralyzing: it destroys and disfigures, then passes the infection on through the imagination or fancy that seems to call up the searing visions again and again, permanently disabling man from seeing beauty. Such blighting experiences (Strephon’s tour, Gulliver’s sojourn in Houyhnhnmland) suggest the retaliatory energy of the physical and the cankering effect of the ‘gross and filthy’ upon ‘fine ideas.’ For, as Swift argues – and demonstrates – in ‘Strephon and Chloe,’ ‘fine ideas vanish fast, / While all the gross and filthy last.’ The ‘awakenings’ of Swift’s unhappy protagonists, though staged as epiphanies, are, as a result, on a deeper level, ‘blindings’ to a deeper, more elusive moral truth. The arts of compromise, of decency, sense, and humour that are the ethical standards of Swift’s serious poetry suggest that, without an acceptance of

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man’s fallen condition, man may be doomed to possession by a fancy that will do little more than darkly remind him of what is lost. Whether the Houyhnhnms are ideal or not is perhaps less important than how lessons about them can be transported to the real world, to better man’s state and improve the systems by which he is governed. The expectations that Gulliver develops in Houyhnhnmland and applies to his native England are clearly more far-reaching than those brought by Strephon and Cassinus to the dressing room or the marriage bed – and this is part of the power of Part Four – but all Swift’s romantics, however admirable their program, are punished by catastrophic visions, the destructive effects of which are proportional to the height of their idealism. The narrator’s mock-retreat at the end of ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ – his refusal to describe the reassembly of Corinna – is telling, not only because it reveals that the act of reconstruction is less artistically interesting to Swift, but also because recovery after such an experience is often impossible, the return of the enlightened to the ‘real’ world often profoundly alienating or, worse, absurd. Because Swift performs the act of dismantling with such relish (the disassembly of Corinna, the blasting of Strephon’s sight with the leavings of Celia’s dressing room, the unhinging of Gulliver), it is easy to miss his prescriptions for a cure, in part because they may be proffered more softly (as in the case of Don Pedro in Gulliver’s Travels) or more conservatively or ambivalently. This problem is exacerbated by the vividness and crudeness of the language that conveys the truth of man’s and woman’s fallenness. The references to ‘wind,’ ‘beans,’ ‘rousers,’ ‘stinking,’ ‘strainings,’ and Chloe’s (hypothetical) contortions of visage as she sits on the privy in ‘Strephon and Chloe’ create a picture of the new-made bride so debasing that it is impossible to recover the decorums that should have prevented these visions in the first place. In all of these cases, what is rendered difficult is, as with Defoe, the simultaneous entertainment of an ideological and a physical stance, a marriage, as it were, of mental and material (though in the instance of Swift such a union does not seem to be courted). As Lawrence acutely remarked of Swift, ‘the fact [of Celia’s mortality] cannot have troubled him, since it applied to himself and to all of us. It was not the fact that Celia shits which so deranged him, it was the thought. His mind couldn’t bear the thought’ (‘Privately Printed’ 281). Lawrence here attributes Swift’s lack of sympathy for the embodied human to intellectual pomposity (‘His arrogant mind overbore him’ [281]), an impaired physical sensibility (‘cold guts’ [282]), and, perhaps more deeply, to a discomfort at any conjunction of material and mental. Lawrence’s diatribe, for all its excesses, illuminates the shock that occurs in Swift’s work when the intellectual becomes invested in or is hunted down (as it inevitably is) by the material.

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But though Lawrence arraigns Swift for needing to ‘square’ the facts of the body with the world as he intellectually or aesthetically wished to perceive it, the Stella poems and the figure of Don Pedro in Gulliver’s Travels suggest otherwise: Swift’s gentle teasing at Stella’s increasing age and size in the birthday poems celebrate the physical ‘facts’ of Stella in an entirely different key, as do his exhibitions in Gulliver’s Travels of Don Pedro’s patience and affection in ‘bringing out’ his difficult passenger. Indeed, Don Pedro de Mendez (unless he himself is a ‘lie’ or, as Fekete has argued, a bully)2 is not a bad compromise between the bestial Yahoos and the rational Houyhnhnms, with the added benefit of his being human. The problem of the Travels is why he is discarded in favour of a ‘higher’ system that clearly cannot be applied to the real world in which Gulliver must spend the rest of his days. Part of the difficulty is one of dramatic emphasis. Don Pedro’s acts of kindness are not as interesting as Gulliver’s overwrought responses to his overtures. Early critics of the Travels, revealingly, make virtually no mention of the kindly Portuguese sea-captain, and the objections to Swift’s brutishness (Jeffrey 10, 45), malevolence (Beattie 43), and unnaturalness (James Harris 2: 538), to the indignation that fuels his style, make clear that for contemporary readers the ‘message’ of Don Pedro did not outweigh its more strident and repulsive intimations of man’s depravity. Francis Jeffrey summarizes this negative and bellicose view of Swift’s art: ‘In all his writings … there is nothing to raise or exalt our notions of human nature, – but every thing to vilify and degrade. We may learn from them, perhaps, to dread the consequences of base actions, but never to love the feelings that lead to generous ones. There is no spirit, indeed, of love or of honour in any part of them’ (45).3 Delany’s view of Swift as so angry as to care nothing about the reform of his audience (171) bears a resemblance to Leavis’s characterization of Swift as a master of negation. In Leavis’s words, ‘We have … in [Swift’s] writings probably the most remarkable expression of negative feelings and attitudes that literature can offer – the spectacle of creative powers (the paradoxical description seems right) exhibited consistently in negation and rejection’ (‘Irony of Swift’ 377). The job of the satirist is not, of course, salving the ego so much as it is inducing active – and perhaps terminal – disillusionment, which is also, perhaps, the state of mind that is its precondition (Watkins 2). Gulliver’s surprise at the failure of his undertaking (‘after above six Months Warning,’ he complains, ‘I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions’ [8]) reflects both his naïveté and Swift’s view of the futility of political and social reform. Gulliver’s powerlessness to repair has much to do with the tenacity with which he clings to his ideal vision of the Houyhnhnms (as well as, of course, the literal way in which he interprets

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it). As much as Gulliver’s ideals are endorsed by Swift (he wishes to extinguish party and faction; change the education of noblemen; reform the courts; reward wit, merit, and learning [8]),4 his inability to achieve ironic distance on himself (the hysteria of the letter to Sympson, the pompous way in which he continues to use the lexicon of Houyhnhnmland [‘Yahoos,’ ‘Houyhnhnms’], his despair as he contemplates the ruins of his project, and, perhaps most tellingly, the arrogance, paranoia, and self-hatred that have resulted in his deliberate retirement from the world) certifies that however ‘superior’ (274) his aims may be, a condescending and prescriptive manner has the effect only of recoiling upon the self, exciting not reform but risibility. Swift’s attention to Gulliver at the end of his travels (which incorporates his expulsion from Houyhnhnmland and the aftermath in Chapter Eleven, a summary of the author’s intentions in Chapter Twelve, and the Letter to Sympson that precedes the work, as well as the apparatus of the Publisher’s Letter to the Reader and the portrait with which the work is introduced) shows his keen interest in the difficulties of accommodating ideal visions in the real world. Such lack of ‘fit’ is the distinctive profile of satire, and if on one hand it prevents a work such as Gulliver’s Travels from seeming ‘novelistic,’ on the other, it throws into relief the problem of bodily accommodation that marks the novel throughout much of the century. In the case of Defoe, the disaccord between real and ideal is not as acute as it is for Swift, but it makes for frequently troubled and abrasive dialogue between the two realms; for Fielding, equally attuned to such differences, it is not only possible but also essential to envision a real world (as he does in Tom Jones) in which ideals such as virtue and love are realized in the day-to-day interactions of ‘actual’ people. For Swift, largely because the body intrudes itself insistently and distastefully into narratives that pretend to focus elsewhere (on, for example, revisionary political, theological, or aesthetic schemes), the contact of real and ideal shocks and damages. And though later eighteenth-century novelists concerned with the body’s disruptive presence temper the rude satire of Swift (as, for example, does Smollett, whose reservations about the turbulence and unpleasantness of the body resemble Swift’s), a disease about the body’s place in an ideal world lingers as a point that is accorded sustained and increasingly sympathetic attention as the century progresses. Much of the distinctive tone of Swift’s satire derives from a strategy of outline that carefully delineates real and ideal and then disposes them in ways that damage our expectations about how the world ought to be. For Defoe, the material universe can vibrate with untold truths (the footprint, the storms), but for Swift there is never any spiritual ‘track’ or passage that might potentially confer meaning on the empirical world, no field of higher sense towards which

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the mind through matter might successfully aspire. Vanished from Gulliver’s travels is any pretext that Swift’s protagonist seeks a more elevated spiritual realm: in place of Crusoe’s anguished weighing and counterweighing of ideas of deliverance are a markedly secular curiosity and a desire (until the last voyage) to return to the homeland laden with stories and souvenirs. (Mocked throughout are Crusoe’s efforts at deliverance and industry: the episode of the boat in Part Two and the painstaking description of Gulliver weaving the Queen’s hairs into a chair seat seem aimed at undermining the earnestness of Defoe’s spiritual hero.)5 Swift arranges Gulliver’s repeated shipwrecks and enforced isolations not as warnings from God to reform but as opportunities to expose his readers to different political and social systems. Gulliver’s passivity as he travels from place to place resembles that of Crusoe but it is not, in contrast, designed to prepare him in any way for recognition of a higher order. The spiritual tension that invests Crusoe’s activities on the island is thus explicitly absent from Gulliver’s tale. It is as if Gulliver is washed up on islands devoid of intrinsic meaning, in which access to some superior register is pointedly withheld. Gulliver’s Travels in this sense appears at once to embrace the novelistic enterprise (insofar as it favours a secular outlook) and to press home its absurdity. Stilling Defoe’s fretful oscillation between the worlds of sense and spirit, he eliminates any possibility of meaningful transformation by keeping from his protagonist any path to a higher plane. Gulliver thus reads not like a Crusoe who has come to his senses but like one who has lost his focus, one whose self-absorption works actively against anything but the most ridiculous ‘cure.’6 He makes observations but their significance is for the most part lost on him. Eschewing this capacity for mystery or strange incarnation, Gulliver’s travels teach by a process of collision, a process that capitalizes upon Swift’s tendency to pit the material against the ideal, usually with shocking or explosive results. His inclination towards a binary view7 and his proclivity toward ranking or seriation (Milic 84–121; Rawson, Gulliver 87), as well as the vividly physical way in which he renders his world, depend upon preventing the intersection or interpenetration of elements. The result is a system and logic that give the impression of choice (and hence of the possibility to exercise free will). But in the Travels the options (Houyhnhnm/Yahoo) are so radically polarized that choice (a choice that one could ‘live with,’ as it were) is rendered impossible and reconciliation unthinkable.8 Freedom (of choice, of mobility), thus becomes, as it will for Richardson (and for some strikingly similar reasons), the grand illusion. The emphasis on Gulliver’s confinement throughout the Travels, coupled with the incidental violence of the work, betray what is at stake in this drama of choice(s). The body’s involvement in this predicament sets additional limits on the

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range of human mobility. In Gulliver’s Travels, the body is never delicate or beautiful (unless it is indistinct, as in Gulliver’s view of the Lilliputian court – ‘The Ladies and Courtiers were all most magnificently clad, so that the Spot they stood upon seemed to resemble a Petticoat spread on the Ground, embroidered with Figures of Gold and Silver’ [25–6] – or his picture of the world’s smallest seamstress: ‘a young Girl threading an invisible Needle with invisible Silk’ [51]); rather, the body tends to be crude, gross, revolting. Gulliver’s portrait of the nurse giving suck in Brobdingnag or the beggar with the cancerous breast – and even the vignettes of himself in Lilliput – arouse not solicitude or pity but shock caused by the ugliness of the human body: But all in vain [Gulliver writes of the Brobdingnagian nurse’s attempt to quiet her charge], so that she was forced to apply the last Remedy by giving it suck. I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape and Colour. It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous. (82–3)

Striking here is not only Gulliver’s unwilling attraction to (so that his reader may recoil from) the domestic female body but also its simultaneous amenability and resistance to the processes of measuring and analysis (‘I cannot tell what to compare with … six Foot … sixteen in Circumference’). Pressed closer by a prurient curiosity that Gulliver also attributes to the ‘curious’ reader, his revulsion rendered both mathematically and in reference to his own body (‘half the Bigness of my Head’), Gulliver, like Strephon, sees too much and as a result proceeds to apply his malignant knowledge to the innocent: ‘this made me reflect upon the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying Glass, where we find by Experiment that the smoothest and whitest Skins look rough and coarse, and ill coloured’ (83). Gulliver’s account of the beggars in Lobrulgrud reflects a similar view of the body as monstrous and penetrable: One Day the Governess ordered our Coachman to stop at several Shops; where the Beggars watching their Opportunity, crouded to the Sides of the Coach, and gave me the most horrible Spectacles that ever an European Eye beheld. There was a Woman with a Cancer in her Breast, swelled to a monstrous Size, full of Holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole

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Body. There was a Fellow with a Wen in his Neck, larger than five Woolpacks; and another with a couple of wooden Legs, each about twenty Foot high. But, the most hateful Sight of all was the Lice crawling on their Cloathes: I could see distinctly the Limbs of these Vermin with my naked Eye, much better than those of an European Louse through a Microscope; and their Snouts with which they rooted like Swine. They were the first I had ever beheld; and I should have been curious enough to dissect one of them, if I had proper Instruments (which I unluckily left behind me in the Ship) although indeed the Sight was so nauseous, that it perfectly turned my Stomach. (101–2)

Again, the emphasis is on revulsion (‘horrible … monstrous … nauseous … it perfectly turned my Stomach’) and curiosity combined. (Gulliver regrets having left behind his surgical instruments so that he is unable to dissect the lice that ‘root’ in the clothes of the beggars.) The body here, grotesquely inflated, is no longer amenable to art, only to science. The ugly draws, implicating and contaminating the viewer in a strange and unsettling fashion. A sympathetic response is forestalled on the basis of scale alone, and, if only in self-defence, is turned into spectacle. Gulliver’s fantasy of entering the cancerous tumour of the woman betrays a desire to touch and to penetrate, but the motivation behind such a vision is not that of a dispassionate (or even, as in the case of Frankenstein, an overeager) medic or artist, but an inclination that mixes infantilism, voyeurism, and self-defilement in more disturbing ways. As with Yeats, Swift’s imagination is inextricably connected to the body, but for Swift, this world is unredemptive – it is the world of the ugly, the rude, the gross, the mechanical, which he views with the eye of a compulsive and unsettled anatomist. His characters (Strephon, Gulliver, the projectors, the enthusiasts), who apply the magnifying glass and bellows to places that they should not go, are rewarded with aural and visual scenarios of lurid and blighting spectacles, so exaggeratedly grotesque as to become unverifiable, hypothetical, phantasmal (as in the worm that Strephon, viewing the glass, imagines in Celia’s nose, or the likeness to swine that the lice exhibit on the beggars’ clothes). In each of these instances, as with all encounters with the human body, the closer the view, the more spectacular and deranging the prospect. The only thing that Celia’s glass reflects is Strephon’s maddened probing into the forbidden ground of the female frame, his terror, his hubris, as he eagerly turns over the evidence of Celia’s bodily nature. The collapse of insight and blindness here is a hallmark of Swift: Strephon, like a comic Gloucester (and like Gulliver returned to the Platonic cave), who by the end of the poem has ‘seen all,’ is effectively blind, not only because of the one-sided nature of his quest but also because his carnal discoveries have made deeper, or more elevated,

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insights impossible. And Strephon is equally ignorant of his complicity in distorting his victim in this way. The analogy to the satiric method is instructive. Holding the glass up to Celia, Strephon reflects his own image, which is so monstrous that he cannot recognize himself. He then acts on what he incorrectly sees. Gulliver copies this act of legerdemain. The reader (it is hoped), looking on, corrects it. But such corrections are not easy to perform. Swift’s disparaging portrayals of the human body, which in his most virulent satires overshadow any attempt to regard the human condition with sympathy or benevolence, have elicited dismay since the eighteenth century. Beattie complained that Swift ‘wallows in nastiness and brutality’ (43–4). Johnson noted his delight in ‘ideas physically impure’ (Lives 3: 1217) and wondered at Swift’s preoccupation with ‘disease, deformity, and filth,’ which, he argued, do not engage the imagination: ‘The greatest difficulty,’ wrote Johnson, ‘that occurs in analysing [Swift’s] character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas, from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust. The ideas of pleasure, even when criminal, may solicite the imagination: but what has disease, deformity, and filth, upon which the thoughts can be allured to dwell?’ (Lives 2: 1020). Taine, concerned by Swift’s relentless emphasis on the repellent and the ugly, contrasted him with the joyful, fecund Rabelais and lamented his pitiless emphasis on degradation and vileness (3: 237–8). According to Augustine Birrell, ‘No fouler pen than Swift’s has soiled our literature … He is full of odious images, of base and abominable allusions” (2). As with Victor Frankenstein, a preoccupation with the bodily and the material to the apparent exclusion of the spiritual is perceived as a bar to higher flights of (moral) imagination. Such a vision creates shock but precludes translation into more expansive terms. Reactions to Part Four of the Travels in particular, in which (as in the scatological poems of 1730 and 1731) this view of the body culminates, are often figured as explosive somatic ones: ‘a Man grows sick at the shocking Things inserted there; his Gorge rises’ (Anonymous, Letter 7). (Mrs Pilkington’s mother completed the motion, throwing up her dinner at ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ [Pilkington 1: 314].) Swift, in Thackeray’s famous assessment, is inextricable from his own Yahoos, assaulting his readers with filth.9 Orwell, too, noted Swift’s monocular concentration on ‘dirt, folly and wickedness’ to the exclusion of nobler elements of the human condition, a wilful distortion of the greater picture of what it is to be human: Swift falsifies his picture of the whole world by refusing to see anything in human life except dirt, folly and wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the whole does exist, and it is something which we all know about while shrinking

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from mentioning it. Part of our minds – in any normal person it is the dominant part – believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence. In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. (222)

Huxley spoke similarly and unforgettably of ‘the intensity, the almost insane violence of that “hatred of bowels” which is the essence of [Swift’s] misanthropy and which underlies the whole of his work’ (99). Swift’s ‘excremental vision’ (a phrase popularized by Norman O. Brown, after John Middleton Murry [Jonathan Swift])10 has become a byword of Swift criticism, his preoccupation with the anal function giving rise to various theories about his impotence, his mysophobia, and impaired genital demands (see Karpman; Greenacre). ‘To discover the allure of filth,’ writes Carol Houlihan Flynn, ‘is to become Swift’ (Body in Swift and Defoe 221). Feminist critics such as Gubar (380–9) and Nussbaum have further elaborated on Swift’s peculiar horror at the female body. Common to these assessments is a view of Swift as at once compulsively drawn to and revolted by the human body, seeing, almost in spite of himself, so closely and invasively that his imagination becomes clouded and darkened by the view (Strephon, in the precincts of Celia’s private space; Gulliver, in his imagination, inside the cancerous hole). That Swift recognizes (and, in some cases, enacts) the adduction and the tyranny of the material is clear (the two Strephons, the narrator of Certain Abuses, and, in theory, the projectors of the Academy of Lagado, smell, grope, and probe their way to increasing certainty), but an exclusively sensory orientation of this kind clearly borders on the pathological. It is also, one might note, funny, if in a sophomoric way. But however much such a vision may have delighted Swift, it is senseless to grope a chamber pot in search of hope. The primacy of the body, which Denis Donoghue argues is Swift’s sine qua non, arises from its lowness – its rude humour (its farting, its belching, its stenches, its emissions), before which all that is ideal and uplifting must fall. Its crudeness discredits and debases. Thus, not only are Swift’s victims linked to filth (‘garbage, farts, turds’ [Ehrenpreis, Swift 3: 579]); ‘the very act of creation,’ in Ehrenpreis’s words, ‘is [also] something Swift often connected with filth’ (3: 691). The Yahoos discharging their excrements from the trees thus, in a certain unpleasant sense, are (as Thackeray memorably argued) analogous to Swift. But, as G. Wilson Knight has pointed out, Swift’s ‘physical nausea’ (the unclean effects of which he visits on his satirical victims, in a shockingly visceral way) is balanced (and perhaps caused) by ‘intellectual scorn’ (163–4). Though Watkins suggests that Swift’s agony derives from

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a morbid preoccupation with the flesh, an inability to achieve unity between body and soul (‘the chasm between spirit and flesh he cannot bridge’ [14]),11 Empson, in his examination of The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, contends that Swift’s fear lay in a potential collapse of that dualism, that ‘everything spiritual is really material; Hobbes and the scientists have proved this … The language plays into his hands here, because the spiritual words are all derived from physical metaphors; as he saw again and again how to do this the pleasure of ingenuity must have become a shock to faith’ (60–1). The ‘fall into Matter’ (Mechanical Operation 189) that is inevitably forced at the expense of man’s higher faculties happens by means of debunking and demythologizing, as the body arrests flights of fancy with its embarrassing and untimed monitions. The more elevated his visions, the more likely the philosopher is to be ‘seduced … into a Ditch’ (Mechanical Operation 190). The Laputians, one of whose eyes is ‘turned inward, and the other directly up to the Zenith’ (146), are thus ‘so wrapped up in Cogitation, that [they are] in manifest Danger of falling down every Precipice, and bouncing [their Heads] against every Post; and in the Streets, of jostling others, or being jostled [themselves] into the Kennel’ (147–8). (This last punishment, for those who have abjured the flesh, is particularly apt.) Graphically ‘abstracted’ from their bodies, ‘rapt in Speculation,’ they pursue their mathematical and musical interests as their wives retaliate by living the life of the body ‘below’ in Lagado (152). A similar constellation of self-centredness, bodily disengagement, paranoia, and tyranny, interestingly, will mark the projector Gulliver as he returns from his great odyssey to take up retirement in Nottinghamshire. Such radical schisms between the concerns of the mind and those of the body both profoundly unsettle Swift and form the distinctive dynamic of his art. The bifurcated universe of Houyhnhnmland exhibits, in this sense, a palimpsest for man’s most pressing work: that of locating himself somewhere between the two extremes of mind and body. The cruelty of Part Four lies not in the equation of man and Yahoo, but in Swift’s more damaging claim that man, endowed with a share of reason and unwilling or unable to exercise it, has, of his own will, achieved a position below the Yahoos, who, in their brutality, greed, and filth, are, in a paradoxical sense, at least ‘pure.’12 So the Houyhnhnms argue: ‘Although [my Master] hated the Yahoos of this Country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious Qualities, than he did a Gnnayh (a Bird of Prey) for its Cruelty, or a sharp Stone for cutting his Hoof. But, when a Creature pretending to Reason, could be capable of such Enormities, he dreaded lest the Corruption of that Faculty might be worse than Brutality itself’ (230–1). Perhaps Houyhnhnmland is the ideal commonwealth to Swift. The mind

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pursues its own serene pleasures in the certainty of its rightness, leaving the body to get on with its own business by itself. It is at least a utopia that embraces the terms of its own balance, a clarity about its most important definitions (unlike Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Laputa and Balnibarbi). But the stability of Houyhnhnmland is fragile at best: the Yahoos are regarded with loathing, as an eruptive force that must be carefully monitored, for fear of rebellions. This is why ultimately – at least, so the Houyhnhnm council leads him to believe – Gulliver must be exiled from Houyhnhnmland. It is, apparently, only man (not horse) that can combine body and spirit in some potentially explosive way – it is only here, in an arena in which choice can be made (to tell the truth, to lie), that the potential to ennoble or to degrade can occur. That Gulliver accomplishes the latter points to the darkness and the rigour of Swift’s vision. As delightful as the fussy austerity of the Houyhnhnms may be, Houyhnhnmland has, as noted by Swift’s earliest readers, an element of absurdity, especially when it is tested against a human world in which the lessons of satire must ultimately be applied. The vision of the horses conferring like philosophers (211), ‘sitting … upon their Hams’ (213), laughing (249), and threading needles (256), is ridiculous, not ennobling,13 as, on a certain level, are their solemn assemblies in which the subject of discussion never changes. Swift’s imagination is in a profound way tied to the body, not separated antiseptically from it. (Recall Ehrenpreis’s claim that the act of creation itself ‘is something Swift often connected with [bodily emissions] and filth’ [Swift 3: 691].) The vividness of physical detail in Gulliver’s Travels as well as Swift’s emphasis throughout the Travels on oversized bodies and body parts (genitals, breasts) and on bodily functions (most notably, urination and defecation) insists on the need to account in some way for this ‘lower’ register. If Gulliver ultimately becomes a professor of virtue, he began his vocational life as a manipulator of bodies, as a surgeon (though, curiously, we see few signs of his medical expertise). That he finds no way of unifying these concerns except in a grotesquely parodic way suggests the difficulty of his imaginative enterprise. The human body, with its inelegance, its frailty, and the questions of racial and moral classification to which it gives rise, is at the centre of Gulliver’s Travels, as Gulliver steers between Brobdingnagian and monkey, Houyhnhnm and Yahoo. If juxtapositions of size, as Samuel Johnson remarked, inspired the design of the Travels,14 ‘embodied’ concepts account for much of the work’s humour and oddness, qualities that reach their height in the grotesqueness of Part Three with the Laputians and the outrageous projects at the Academy of Lagado. Here, the reader experiences Swift’s keen delight at literalizing the

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abstract. In a particularly arresting case, representing the proposal of a political professor at the Academy, he describes a method to reconcile differences of political opinion: When Parties in a State are violent, he offered a wonderful Contrivance to reconcile them. The Method is this. You take an Hundred Leaders of each Party; you dispose them into Couples of such whose Heads are nearest of a Size; then let two nice Operators saw off the Occiput of each Couple at the same Time, in such a Manner that the Brain may be equally divided. Let the Occiputs thus cut off be interchanged, applying each to the Head of his opposite Party-man. It seems indeed to be a Work that requireth some Exactness; but the Professor assured us, that if it were dextrously performed, the Cure would be infallible. For he argued thus; that the two half Brains being left to debate the Matter between themselves within the Space of one Scull, would soon come to a good Understanding, and produce that Moderation as well as Regularity of Thinking, so much to be wished for in the Heads of those, who imagine they came into the World only to watch and govern its Motion: And as to the Difference of Brains in Quantity or Quality, among those who are Directors in Faction; the Doctor assured us from his own Knowledge, that it was a perfect Trifle. (176–7)

On the other hand, and perhaps relatedly, we note a recurrent and less overtly humorous concern with the limitations and inconveniences of man’s physical frame. From Gulliver’s first voyage to Lilliput, there is something at once grotesque and vulnerable about his body as well as something paradoxical about Gulliver’s attitude towards it. Whether Gulliver moves among peoples that are small or large, Swift’s emphasis is inevitably on large bodies, bodies that are colossal, cumbersome, and shocking to delicacy in their appearance and functions. And whether Gulliver is a giant in Lilliput or small in Brobdingnag, his bodily frame renders him liable to insult and injury. It is an inept body, flawed, misdesigned, an idea adumbrated in Parts Three and Four (after the initial points about man’s grossness and frailty have been made in Parts One and Two, respectively) in repeated discussions about the body’s propensity towards disease (the Struldbruggs) and hints at man’s unfitness (which the Master Houyhnhnm amplifies from earlier comments by the King of Brobdingnag). However limited such discussions are by virtue of their ‘corpocentrism,’ and however satirically Swift is treating the methods and conclusions of natural philosophy, they have the result of questioning the utility of man’s physical design: But, considering the Frame of our Bodies, and especially of mine, [the Master

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Houyhnhnm] thought no Creature of equal Bulk was so ill-contrived … my Nails were of no Use either to my fore or hinder Feet: As to my fore Feet … they were too soft to bear the Ground … I could not walk with any Security; for if either of my hinder Feet slipped, I must inevitably fall. He then began to find fault with other Parts of my Body; the Flatness of my Face, the Prominence of my Nose, mine Eyes placed directly in Front, so that I could not look on either Side without turning my Head: That I was not able to feed my self, without lifting one of my fore Feet to my Mouth … [Those] several Clefts and Divisions in my Feet behind … were too soft to bear the Hardness and Sharpness of Stone without a Covering made from the Skin of some other Brute; that my whole Body wanted a Fence against Heat and Cold, which I was forced to put on and off every Day with Tediousness and Trouble. (225)

Such a lengthy catalogue of faults recalls the observations of the Brobdingnagian scholars who, after criticizing Gulliver’s shape, conclude, because they cannot imagine how he is able to support himself, that he must be ‘an Embrio, or abortive Birth’ (93). In both instances (but less so in Part Four, where Gulliver’s growing contempt for his own body lends a certain credence to the Master Houyhnhnm’s views) Swift ridicules the scientific method that is vitiated by an inability to see outside of one’s own frame of reference (a problem that later will fatally afflict Gulliver), but nonetheless raises the question of the body’s utility in some detail here, implicitly critiquing (or at least questioning) the ‘human form divine.’15 The representation of Gulliver’s body in Part One is less oblique. Swollen to an immense size, Gulliver presents to the diminutive Lilliputians a ‘shocking Sight’ (83). As he recalls in Brobdingnag (linking himself in the process with the grotesque body of the nurse, which he has just described), a friend of his once said, ‘he could discover great Holes in my Skin; that the Stumps of my Beard were ten Times stronger than the Bristles of a Boar; and my Complexion made up of several Colours altogether disagreeable’ (83). Because Gulliver has little patience for the Lilliputians’ point of view, what Gulliver ‘looks like’ must be inferred from what the Lilliputians do to him. Gulliver in Lilliput is bulk and ‘Carcass’ (64). He is hefted onto a Wagon as he sleeps and conveyed to Court. The Lilliputians’ main concerns are with his bodily needs: feeding him, clothing him, and disposing of his waste. As they find themselves increasingly unable and unwilling to maintain him (though faction and political plotting [Swift’s main focus in Part One] are at the bottom of the debate), they contemplate various methods of putting him to death: incinerating him in his house, shooting him with poisoned arrows, blinding him, starving him, strewing a poisonous juice on his shirts and sheets, ‘which

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would soon make you tear your own Flesh, and die in the utmost Torture’ (62). A graphic account of Gulliver’s hypothetical decay and disposal suggests the unpleasantness of both his size and his physicality. One plan for Gulliver’s extermination, as Gulliver’s confidant reports, consists of ‘gradually lessening your Establishment; by which, for want of sufficient Food, you would grow weak and faint, and lose your Appetite, and consequently decay and consume in a few Months; neither would the Stench of your Carcass be then so dangerous, when it should become more than half diminished; and immediately upon your Death, five or six Thousand of his Majesty’s Subjects might, in two or three Days, cut your Flesh from your Bones, take it away by Cart-loads, and bury it in distant Parts to prevent Infection; leaving the Skeleton as a Monument of Admiration to Posterity’ (64). A focus upon Gulliver’s genital and anal functions calls additional attention to his grotesque corporeality. ‘The Demands of Nature’ (19) first compel him to call for food, then to ‘[make] Water’ (20), the latter which feat Gulliver describes as plentiful and torrential, awakening ‘great Astonishment’ (21) on the part of the Lilliputians. (The adventure of the fire, in which Gulliver applies his copious urine to the Queen’s apartment, awakens amazement of a different kind [49–50].) Gulliver’s next ‘Adventure’ is to disburden himself in his house, a duty he performs with great reluctance and shame: ‘I had been for some Hours extremely pressed by the Necessities of Nature; which was no Wonder, it being almost two Days since I had last disburthened myself. I was under great Difficulties between Urgency and Shame. The best Expedient I could think on, was to creep into my House, which I accordingly did; and shutting the Gate after me, I went as far as the Length of my Chain would suffer; and discharged my Body of that uneasy Load’ (24). Swift here deliberately attempts to shock his reader by dramatizing details that are conventionally, in the interests of decorum, withheld, and by exaggerating to a ludicrous extent the circumstantiality of the travel (or novelistic) account. Gulliver in this passage is likened to a dog, ‘doing his duty’ at the end of a chain. Later, Swift has Gulliver stand ‘like a Colossus’ as the general’s troops march under him looking up, in defiance of His Majesty’s orders, at the spectacle afforded by his decaying breeches (36–7).16 The prodigious eating and drinking that Gulliver performs in Lilliput animate his private parts to unusual energy,17 and Swift’s emphasis on his corporeality makes man seem a machine for digestion and decay.18 What is curious about Gulliver in Lilliput is that, despite his bulk and extraordinary strength (relative to the insect-like Lilliputians), he is more often than not depicted as vulnerable and helpless. He awakens, in a pattern that gains increasing emphasis in the Travels, tied to the ground, ‘strongly fastened

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on each Side … and my Hair … tied down in the same Manner’ (17). On his back, he can only look upward and, as the sun rises, it begins to ‘[offend] [his] Eyes’ (17). Efforts to break loose result in ‘excessive Pain’ (both from his hair being pulled and from the shower of arrows that fall on his hand and face) (17). Despite repeated blustering (18, 19–20, 21), it is clear that the huge Gulliver is at the mercy of his tiny captors, both physically and, stranger still, morally, as his posture during his sojourn there remains curiously subservient; he regards himself (vaguely) as bound by promises of honour, by laws of hospitality that restrain him from dashing the Lilliputians to the ground as they pass backwards and forward on his body (19–20). Such an attitude culminates in his pride at the notice shown him by the Emperor (39), at the conferral upon him of the title of Nardac (47, 59), and in his toadyish currying of favour with the King of Blefuscu (48). Though Gulliver repeatedly brags of his power over his hosts (‘as for the Inhabitants,’ he observes, ‘I had Reason to believe I might be a Match for the greatest Armies they could bring against me’ [18]),19 a more accurate image of his position in Lilliput is that of a recumbent body chained to a temple. Swift refers regularly to Gulliver’s constriction and passivity in Lilliput. He is tied to the ground, bound with ‘six and thirty Padlocks’ to a temple, searched by order of the Emperor, and used (if the articles of his liberty are to be believed) for menial tasks as well as for purposes of war.20 Though he frequently reiterates his desire for liberty (18, 28, 33, 37, 39, 65), Swift’s protagonist makes no real effort to free himself, converting, instead, instances of his humiliation (being searched, being exposed) to events that magnify his importance. Thus, he stands ‘like a Colossus’ (36) as the troops divert themselves at his breeches; subjected to an insulting and humiliating inquisition, he plumes himself on his own interpretation of Quinbus Flestrin – the ‘Great Man Mountain’ (29)21 – speaking repeatedly of himself as a prodigy of bulk and digestion. He shows off his weapons and brags of his phallic prowess (both indirectly, in the rumour of his intrigue with a Lady of the Court, and directly, in his flamboyant extinguishing of the fire in Her Majesty’s chambers). It is this arrogance coupled with man’s littleness and helplessness (the lesson of both Part One and Part Two) that particularly vexed Swift. The apparent dearth of beauty and grace in Lilliput – the nation instead is portrayed as a sink of political corruption and pettiness – is striking, given other opportunities of the microscopic perspective. For Swift, smallness yields occasions for damaging moral, not pleasing aesthetic reflection, though, curiously, the inverse is not true: Gulliver’s grossness is also described with distaste. To be little (six inches high) is to be morally small, despite the small person’s unsettling power to command authority and even admiration. (The

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Emperor, ‘taller by almost the Breadth of [Gulliver’s] Nail’ than any of his Court, ‘[strikes] Awe into [his] Beholders’ [25].) To be large is to be gross, indelicate, and obtuse (in part because the body’s demands become more obvious and overt). This strange moral geometry (small = small; large = small) stays relatively intact in Brobdingnag (though Glumdalclitch, the King, and the Queen of Brobdingnag display a largesse of vision, charity, and humour that exempts them from a simple application of this rubric). Swift’s pleasure in unexpected reversal (a pattern that Dixsaut sees as impelling the peculiar vertiginous energy of the Travels)22 is apparent as he inverts the size ratio of Gulliver and his captors in Part Two, with the added moral ‘fillip’ that, as Gulliver becomes small and his hosts large, we realize simultaneously (if this is possible) the relativity of those terms and their inapplicability. (Gulliver has been ‘small’ from the beginning.) To add to the tension, Swift’s satire also becomes more urgent in Part Two, as humorous vignettes about court antics and education make way for more extended rhetorical sequences on moral degeneration, pride, and violence (Gulliver’s audiences with the King). As Gulliver in his pygmy state invites and elicits more narrative interest and moves towards centre stage (the theatrical metaphor is particularly apt in Part Two), the reader’s engagement with the work becomes more dynamic, and perhaps more ‘novelistic,’ as Swift devises various adventures for his hero (the trip through the cornfield, the tour round the provinces, Gulliver’s life at court, his abduction by the monkey) that enliven, accelerate, and lend greater coherence to the narrative. (The focus in Part One, where we see things mostly through the eyes of the giant Gulliver, is necessarily more ‘spectatorial,’ more tableauesque, though Swift is concerned with this concept in many different ways in this work.) The emphasis on Gulliver’s vulnerability (one that, according to Paul Fussell, dominates the Travels, often in most gratuitous ways) is necessarily more insistent in Part Two, as Gulliver’s small stature renders him more liable to injury in a land of giants (though, as is typical of Swift, the same logic cannot be applied backwards, to Part One). As the King will deliver in Part Two the first of two important dissertations on man’s unfitness of design (93, 125–6), Gulliver’s helplessness attracts more notice. ‘Pierced’ by beards of fallen corn (78), expecting to be ‘squashed to Death under [a Reaper’s] Foot, or cut in two with his … Hook’ (78–9), later ‘grievously pinched’ (79) by the labourer as he is held sixty feet from the ground, Gulliver presents the reader with a veritable catalogue of hurts, bruises, anxieties, and physical humiliations that will only escalate as Part Two progresses. Coupled with lurid spectacles of (mostly female and lower-class) bodies, man’s corporeal nature becomes asso-

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ciated with ignominy and suffering. Gulliver’s retention of pride under such circumstances puts the final stamp on his littleness, as he boasts of his manner of toasting the farmer’s wife and flourishes his hanger like some piece of mechanical clockwork (81, 88). Telescoping Gulliver to ‘pygmy size’ appears to activate a particularly malevolent imagination on Swift’s part. Rather than allowing Gulliver to succeed at some ‘gigantic’ exploits, he subjects him to one humiliation or awkward situation after another, encouraging the reader to be entertained by both his melodramatic self-pity (Gulliver in the field) and his clownish antics on the table or in the garden. The stripping of Gulliver’s dignity, as he performs for crowds of spectators, is fed by the monkey, and is utilized as some kind of sexual plaything by the maids of honour, is effected by physical abasement. Gulliver, whose size makes him a ‘Curiosity’ (79),23 is eagerly marketed by the farmer, ‘exposed for Money as a publick Spectacle to the meanest of the People’ (87), a prospect that Gulliver records as ‘an Indignity’ (87), ‘ignomin[ious]’ (88) and a ‘Misfortune’ (88). The pattern of bodily injury and harm that distinguishes the Travels is particularly insistent in this part. Gulliver’s ship casts anchor near Brobdingnag after a violent storm (75–6). Gulliver, seeking refuge in a cornfield from ‘Monsters [bearing] Reaping-Hooks’ (77), is impaled by corn-beards, apprehensive of being ‘squashed to Death’ or ‘cut in two’ with a reaping hook (78–9), eaten by labourers (78), or ‘dash[ed] … against’ (or, later, ‘falling’ to [81]) ‘the Ground’ (79). ‘Cruelly … hurt by the Pressure of his [rescuer’s] Thumb and Finger’ (79), he is transported to the farmer’s house, only to trip on a crust of bread (81), to be seized and dropped by an infant (82), attacked by rats (84), almost hit with a hazelnut (89), and shaken in a box (88). Later, his health is impaired by a program of exhibitions that ‘[reduce him] to a Skeleton’ (91), leaving him ‘half dead with Weariness and Vexation’ (89). ‘I was,’ he reports to the reader after his first public performance, ‘so tired … that I could hardly stand upon my Legs, or speak a Word. It was at least three Days before I recovered my Strength’ (89). The tolls on his body and vexations of spirit connected with his indenture to the farmer are recorded with anger and chagrin. ‘The Life I … led [with this Master],’ Gulliver tells the Queen, ‘was laborious enough to kill an Animal of ten Times my Strength … my Health was much impaired by the continual Drudgery of entertaining the Rabble every Hour of the Day’ (92). Transferred to the court at a bargain price, Gulliver’s physical trials continue. He becomes a target of attack by animals, vegetables, and the Queen’s dwarf, presenting the reader with a litany of hits and near misses that ends with his being dropped from a giant height into the sea.24 Though Gulliver accordingly begins to sample the self-contempt that in

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Part Four will escalate into violent self-hatred, it is not entirely clear (as it is also not in Lilliput) whether Gulliver actually ‘internalizes’ the lessons about human pride that are taught in Brobdingnag or whether, as is more likely, such lessons drive him further from an understanding of himself. Indeed, his assessment of his changing sense of ‘proportion’ reveals a disturbing combination of pomposity and self-loathing: after having been accustomed several Months to the Sight and Converse of this People, and observed every Object upon which I cast my Eyes, to be of proportionable Magnitude; the Horror I had first conceived from their Bulk and Aspect was so far worn off, that if I had then beheld a Company of English Lords and Ladies in their Finery and Birth-day Cloaths, acting their several Parts in the most courtly Manner of Strutting, and Bowing and Prating; to say the Truth, I should have been strongly tempted to laugh as much at them as the King and his Grandees did at me. Neither indeed could I forbear smiling at my self, when the Queen used to place me upon her Hand towards a Looking-Glass, by which both our Persons appeared before me in full View together; and there could nothing be more ridiculous than the Comparison: So that I really began to imagine my self dwindled many Degrees below my usual Size. (97)25

Despite the fact that the accidents of Gulliver’s life become one of the chief diversions of the court (‘I was every Day,’ he reports, ‘furnishing the Court with some ridiculous Story’ [112]), Gulliver’s conceited posturing (wiping his tiny hanger on the lappet of his coat after the battle with the rats [84], challenging the Queen’s dwarf to wrestling matches [97], cutting flies to pieces as they buzz overhead [99])26 shows his pretentiousness (a lesson he readily applies to mankind in general, not realizing its relevance to himself [112]). On the level of Swift’s dramatic narrative, Gulliver’s mishaps and his blindness to his own littleness are comic, but when Swift transposes these attitudes to a political or moral plane (as he does in the audiences with the King), Gulliver’s shortness of vision becomes more problematic. His enthusiastic descriptions of England elicit a ‘hearty Fit of laughing’(96) from the monarch, whom he has licensed to read man’s littleness from his stature in a most literal way. The King observes ‘how contemptible a Thing was human Grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive Insects as I’ (96). After more extended audiences, in which Gulliver expatiates on the English Parliament, the courts of justice, and the management of the treasury, his tone is more solemn: My little Friend Grildrig; you have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country. You have clearly proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice are the proper

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Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator. That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some Lines of an Institution, which in its Original might have been tolerable; but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by Corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one Perfection is required towards the Procurement of any one Station among you; much less that Men are ennobled on Account of their Virtue, that Priests are advanced for their Piety or Learning, Soldiers for their Conduct or Valour, Judges for their Integrity, Senators for the Love of their Country, or Counsellors for their Wisdom … by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pains wringed and extorted from you; I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. (120–1)

As the moral tone of Swift’s satire darkens (the King’s indictment of the human race will shortly be affirmed by Gulliver’s offer of gunpowder to the pacific monarch), the body (and its leavings) take on an almost oppressive and certainly more obnoxious presence. Gulliver is (like Strephon) subjected to sights of bodies (human, reptilian, and insectile) that revolt not only from their hugeness (the nurse’s breast [82–3]), but also from disease (the tumorous beggar woman [101]), desire (the smells of the maids of honour [107]), death (the execution [108]), and excretions (the ‘Loathsome Excrement or Spawn’ [98] left by flies on food and the ‘viscous Matter’ that allows them to walk on the ceiling; the frog in the boat that bedaubs his face and clothes with its ‘odious Slime’ [110]). Here are sights better left unseen – the parti-coloured skin and moles and hair that make ugly and repel. The body magnified proves man’s proximity to beast, not angel, and certifies the level upon which he is at once most imperilled and least proud. Gulliver’s physical vulnerability in Part Two – his littleness magnified, as it were, by his ridiculous sense of self-importance – makes more overt the trope of his imprisonment, as he is carried from place to place in his box, the roof of which is locked over him at night (95), or as he is held ‘fast by Leading-strings’ by Glumdalclitch (90),27 a veritable baby later seen being force-fed by a simian nurse (110–11) or running triumphantly to his keeper with a linnet (107). There is certainly no poetry of the body in this world (a fact shortly to be reinforced by the grotesque shapes of the Laputians and their unnatural schism between body and intellect) and Gulliver’s self-image (which becomes increasingly unstable as his travels proceed) seems locked into judgments he makes about his inferior size or physical appearance, from which he appears to encourage the reader to draw conclusions about racial affinities (the ‘species’ questions that arise out of the adventure with the

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monkey and the sexual episode with the female Yahoo). At least for Gulliver, a more ‘elevated’ or subtle set of criteria appears unavailable: the Lilliputians leaping and creeping for courtly favour are little, Gulliver in Brobdingnag is little, and hence all are ‘contemptible’ (136). This is the method of an artist of the literal, as well as a master of reduction, one who, seeing men as little, with a kind of fiendish glee, shrinks them to match their moral stature. The inquisition into the human body continues in Part Three, refracting into explorations of what happens to minds without bodies (the Laputians, the projectors) and bodies without minds (the Struldbruggs). Swift’s strategies of representation in this last-to-be-composed part of the Travels become more grotesque and exaggerated, especially in the case of the Laputians, ‘so singular,’ according to Gulliver, ‘in their Shapes, Habits, and Countenances’ (146). The Laputians’ contempt for the body is figured in their shapes: ‘their Heads were all reclined either to the Right or the Left; one of their Eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the Zenith’ (146). Their remoteness from the world of sensation is epitomized by their need for flappers, who rouse them to consciousness of their surroundings by discreet taction to their mouths, ears, and eyes. Driven inwards by an exclusive emphasis on speculation, the Laputians lose a sense of their own bodies: endangered by their neglect of physical space (146–7), rendered antisocial (and apolitical) by a deep engagement with their mental worlds, the ‘mechanick’ part of living (eating, clothing, housing) is viewed as beneath the Laputians’ notice. Thus, though a life that derives entirely from the body (the lives that their wives seek to satisfy ‘down below’) is seen as vulgar and limited (even degrading), a life exclusively of speculation is viewed as grotesque and destructive (and whoresome) in another way. Lord Munodi proves that reason can unite the bodily and the intellectual (everything about him, as Gulliver notes, is ‘magnificent, regular, and polite’ [163]), but such a philosophy is scorned in Balnibarbi as inimical to understanding and art (163, 165). If, as David Renaker has argued, Laputa and Balnibarbi reflect Swift’s reservations about both Cartesian and Newtonian or Lockeian epistemology, the charged and destructive relationship between the two islands forecasts, in a crude way, the dilemma of the final part. The Laputians have discarded the body in pursuit of ‘higher’ concerns. This suppression (or sublimation) surfaces, as it were, south, in Balnibarbi, where the body retaliates with a vengeance in the Academy of Lagado, in which schemes arising from ideas that, in theory, have a certain logic collapse under the pressure of physical laws and matter. There is a sense throughout the Academy chapters that the mind may very well be regnant – wildly, even intoxicatingly, free – but attempts to wrestle the physical world into submission to those ideas (softening marbles for pillows

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and pin cushions [171]) are difficult, perhaps possible, and certainly pointless. The self-absorption and volatility of the intellectual set adrift from the body become (as in Frankenstein) pathological, and matter – whether it is the load of objects encumbering the sages who seek to abolish words or the violent discharge of excrement from the dog of the great physician – has its own insistent life and demands that run counter to the ‘airy’ schemes of the projectors. Swift’s satire against learning reaches an acme in the plan of one of the projectors to operate on senators and councilors by reading and treating their political vagaries as diseases of the body – ‘strong Convulsions … grievous Contractions of the Nerves and Sinews in both Hands … Spleen, Flatus, Vertigoes, and Deliriums … scrophulous Tumours full of fœtid purulent Matter … sower frothy Ructations’ (175–6) – against which are administered ‘Lenitives, Aperitives, Abstersives, Corrosives, Restringents, Palliatives, Laxatives, Cephalalgicks, Ictericks, Apophlegmaticks, Acousticks, as their several Cases required’ (176).28 The recommendation to tweak and kick first ministers, followed by the elaborate prescription for reconciling party disagreements by sawing off and then swapping occiputs (176–7), suggest not only Swift’s fury at party squabbling but also his view (which pertains to Gulliver as well, particularly in Part Two) that to treat someone exclusively as a body is to humiliate him, to associate him with activities that disqualify him from honour and respect: Another Professor shewed me a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies against the Government. He advised great Statesmen to examine into the Dyet of all suspected Persons; their Times of eating; upon which Side they lay in Bed; with which Hand they wiped their Posteriors; to take a strict View of their Excrements, and from the Colour, the Odour, the Taste, the Consistence, the Crudeness, or Maturity of Digestion, form a Judgment of their Thoughts and Designs: Because Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at Stool; which he found by frequent Experiment: for in such Conjunctures, when he used merely as a Trial to consider which was the best Way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have a Tincture of Green; but quite different when he thought only of raising an Insurrection, or burning the Metropolis. (178)

In a society in which prestige and dignity are measured in terms of remoteness from bodily products and functions, by the polite erasure of such acts,29 the representation of the high and mighty ‘at Stool’ or ‘wip[ing] their Posteriors’ collapses high and low in a manner that belittles and befouls. To overlook the demands of the body and to dabble in its filth (testing, tasting, probing human excrement – as also in Certain Abuses) are equally pathological, yet to reach a compromise between the two is made difficult by the exaggerated

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and strident way in which Swift likes to represent them. That piles and politics (179) may be yoked, that ‘a Whore can govern the Back-stairs, the Back-stairs a Council, and the Council a Senate’ (186) is shocking to Swift, whether the arena for such governance is bodily or political. The body, in any event, duly provides a map for such corruptions and wrong-turnings (as it does in ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ and, differently, in the Stella poems). So Gulliver records after the parade of historical figures in Glubbdubbdrib: As every Person called up made exactly the same Appearance he had done in the World, it gave me melancholy Reflections to observe how much the Race of human Kind was degenerate among us, within these Hundred Years past. How the Pox under all its Consequences and Denominations had altered every Lineament of an English Countenance: shortened the Size of Bodies, unbraced the Nerves, relaxed the Sinews and Muscles, introduced a sallow Complexion, and rendered the Flesh loose and rancid. (188)

In this account, as in that of the Struldbruggs, Swift deepens and broadens the discussions of Gulliver’s unfitness that marked Part Two. The physical deformities attendant upon and providing irrefutable visual evidence of man’s moral corruption (elaborated upon in the description of the Struldbruggs) reach a horrific climax in the Yahoos of Part Four. Iconographically associated with Hottentots, apes, savage Indians, Christian representations of sin, and the Irish poor, Swift’s Yahoos are described in revolting and unnerving physical detail: Their Heads and Breasts were covered with a thick Hair, some frizzled and others lank; they had Beards like Goats, and a long Ridge of Hair down their Backs, and the fore Parts of their Legs and Feet; but the rest of their Bodies were bare, so that I might see their Skins, which were of a brown Buff Colour. They had no Tails, nor any Hair at all on their Buttocks, except about the Anus; which, I presume Nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the Ground; for this Posture they used, as well as lying down, and often stood on their hind Feet. They climbed high Trees, as nimbly as a Squirrel, for they had strong extended Claws before and behind, terminating in sharp Points, and hooked. They would often spring, and bound, and leap with prodigious Agility. The Females were not so large as the Males; they had long lank Hair on their Heads, and only a Sort of Down on the rest of their Bodies, except about the Anus, and Pudenda. Their Dugs hung between their fore Feet, and often reached almost to the Ground as they walked. The Hair of both Sexes was of several Colours, brown, red, black and yellow. (209)

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Their excremental and sexual preoccupations – they are associated with evacuations and excremental discharges (210), atavistic behaviour of all kinds (quarrelling, tearing food with their teeth [214]), coarseness (215), hairiness (215), brownness (215), greed (215), with self-centredness and hatred, aggression, avarice, appetite, filth – mark them as animalistic, brutal, the lowest common denominator to which man, devoid of the controls of civilized behaviour and sanctions, can sink. As much of the anxiety of Part Four revolves around issues of racial classification30 – specifically the place of Gulliver in Houyhnhnmland – it seems cruel of Swift to polarize Gulliver’s choices so radically. The Yahoos are animalistic (likened to squirrels, goats, cattle), ‘sordid’ (244), ‘vile’ (230), ‘detestable’ (214, 215), ‘abominable’ (214), ‘filthy’ (215), ‘hateful’ (215), ‘odious’ (221), ‘execrable’ (222), ‘degenerate and brutal’ (222). The peculiar relish with which Gulliver describes the loathsome Yahoos is counterpointed by the awe with which he regards the only other significant species inhabiting Houyhnhnmland: the horses. The Houyhnhnms are ‘orderly and cleanly’ (216), regular (216), thoughtful, portrayed (not without humour) as philosophers and councillors. They are virtuous, decent, civil (250); mild (210); rational, judicious (211); thoughtful (212); benevolent and community-minded (250). ‘Temperance, Industry, Exercise and Cleanliness’ (251) are their desiderata. Though the reader may be a bit chilled by the Houyhnhnms’ asceticism (especially in matters of diet, human emotion, and the arts), Gulliver, whose behaviour preoccupies Swift on a much deeper level here, in revulsion against the likeness that he sees between himself and the Yahoos, enlists himself as a star-struck acolyte of the Houyhnhnms, buying wholesale into their ideology in an attempt to distinguish himself from the execrable species to which he seems, by all physical and moral evidence, to belong. The distress that Part Four has traditionally evoked (reactions of this tenor include Thackeray’s, Huxley’s, and Orwell’s) may be predicated less upon an imagination that could see in ‘the human face divine’ (Young 34) sordidness and brutality than upon one that could (like Shelley’s Frankenstein) distil one aspect of man’s nature from the other, creating a society (or species) in which reason must struggle, in a disdainful and appalled way, to keep body and ‘natural’ atavistic instincts under control.31 A chief perversity of Part Four (though there are many) is that Swift propels his hero into a situation in which the terms are set up like choices (Houyhnhnm or Yahoo), an impression that is furthered by repeated attempts to ‘place’ Gulliver on one side or the other. Gulliver’s visceral recoil from the Yahoos at first sight hints at the disconcerting affinity he feels toward their kind. He records that on seeing them, he is ‘a little discomposed’ – so much so that he secretes himself

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behind a thicket to observe them further. After a thorough look he announces with uncharacteristic vehemence, ‘Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy’ (209). He departs ‘full of Contempt and Aversion’ (209) and, unexpectedly meeting one of the race in the roadway, he strikes it, though the creature has given no sign of aggression (or at least no sign that is unequivocally mischievous). If Gulliver’s project in Houyhnhnmland is to attempt to distinguish himself as much as possible from the Yahoos (in whose countenances he, prodded by the Houyhnhnms, observes ‘a perfect human Figure’ [214]), such likeness is defined primarily through physical characteristics, though later, Gulliver’s accounts of human behaviour will align man and Yahoo on a much more profound and disconcerting level.32 The Master Horse ordered a Sorrel Nag, one of his Servants, to untie the largest of these Animals, and take him into the Yard. The Beast and I were brought close together; and our Countenances diligently compared, both by Master and Servant, who thereupon repeated several Times the Word Yahoo. My Horror and Astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable Animal, a perfect human Figure; the Face of it indeed was flat and broad, the Nose depressed, the Lips large, and the Mouth wide: But these Differences are common to all savage Nations, where the Lineaments of the Countenance are distorted by the Natives suffering their Infants to lie grovelling on the Earth, or by carrying them on their Backs, nuzzling with their Face against the Mother’s Shoulders. The Fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my Hands in nothing else, but the Length of the Nails, the Coarseness and Brownness of the Palms, and the Hairiness on the Backs. There was the same Resemblance between our Feet, with the same Differences, which I knew very well, although the Horses did not, because of my Shoes and Stockings; the same in every Part of our Bodies, except as to Hairiness and Colour, which I have already described. (214–15)

It is, interestingly, the Houyhnhnms in the first instance who seem most eager to settle the question of categorization: they bring a Yahoo from his kennel in order ‘diligently’ to ‘compare’ its features with those of their human visitor. In other ways – culinary, sartorial, linguistic – Gulliver does not resemble the Yahoos, and such contradictory evidence unsettles the Master Houyhnhnm: ‘He was convinced (as he afterwards told me) that I must be a Yahoo, but my Teachableness, Civility and Cleanliness astonished him; which were Qualities altogether so opposite to those Animals’ (218). Gulliver, accordingly, is lodged between the house of his Master and the

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stable of the Yahoos, a domestic space in keeping with his ‘bi-racial’ status (‘a wonderful Yahoo, that could speak like a Houyhnhnm’ [219]). As Gulliver is shifted from one position to another on the chain of being that Swift posits in Houyhnhnmland (‘a … Yahoo’; ‘like a Houyhnhnm’; physically, politically, and morally degenerate, yet capable of reason), Gulliver changes his loyalties and species allegiance from man (whom he denominates Yahoo [223ff])33 to horse, begging his Master to forbear calling him Yahoo and eventually resolving to spend the rest of his life with the Houyhnhnms ‘in the Contemplation and Practice of every Virtue’ (240). Gulliver’s expulsion from Houyhnhnmland and its aftermath result in large part from the Houyhnhnms’ inability to incorporate anything foreign into their society – or to tolerate the admixture of traits that they see in their human guest (261).34 Gulliver, as Walter Ong has argued, is like a bacterium that must be expelled lest he infect the society by fomenting discord in the Yahoos (261) (though such mutinous behaviour is difficult to imagine from a disciple as pious and determined as Gulliver). What makes Part Four difficult and compelling is not only the ‘convulsive gaiety of bitter contrasts’ (as Taine would have it [3: 255]), the horrid polarization of Houyhnhnmland, in which Gulliver seeks a place, but also the fact that, though logically and conventionally Gulliver’s position is midway between Houyhnhnm and Yahoo, angel and brute (and Swift toys with these polarities in many ways throughout Part Four), that ‘place’ is in the end determinedly left vacant. That ‘there is hope for mankind neither on the one side nor the other’ (Tyler 114) is a common response to Swift’s Travels – one that reflects the apparently exclusive way in which Swift sees the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. This is the ‘either/or’ paradigm, one to which Swift, according to Rodino, is repeatedly and destructively drawn.35 Ellen Pollak has written suggestively about Swift’s exclusive and destructive logic: Meaning, in Swift’s texts, is generated not – as it is in Pope’s – at the point of poised reconciliation between the contrary terms of a single epistemological or mythic structure (such as between the contradictory nature of Belinda as goddess and tease, or of man as glory and jest); it is produced, rather, at the point where two or more heterogeneous systems of signification meet, engage, and in interacting become the mutual critics of the logic of one another’s terms. Conceiving culture as a relative phenomenon, Swift … sought less to defend any consistent personal position – any single ‘angle of vision’ … – than to explore and thereby expose the limits of individual perspectives by juxtaposing them to alternative points of view. He hoped to remind us that at any given moment a normal-sized eagle seen at a distance might be far more prodigious a bird than we have ever

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Because the social geometry of Houyhnhnmland compels him to plead his species allegiance unequivocally, Gulliver attaches himself to the higher beings on the island. As elsewhere in his oeuvre (the birthday poems to Stella, A Modest Proposal), Swift renders the field of choices mathematically or hierarchically. From Gulliver’s point of view, his options are two. The reader, who perceives a third choice, situates Gulliver between Houyhnhnm and Yahoo. As this alternative and absolutely conventional chain of being begins to form, Swift, however, engages in a manoeuvre that causes Gulliver’s place to slip, in the startling way of a Jacob’s ladder, below that of the Yahoos, with his reason not promoting him above but demoting him below the beast. Indeed, the Master Houyhnhnm’s conclusion sets man outside the pale of any discernible order altogether: ‘He looked upon us as a Sort of Animals to whose Share, by what Accident he could not conjecture, some small Pittance of Reason had fallen, whereof we made no other Use than by its Assistance to aggravate our natural Corruptions, and to acquire new ones which Nature had not given us’ (241). Gulliver’s disquisition to the Master Houyhnhnm of ‘what human Nature in our Parts of the World is capable to perform’ (227) suggests, indeed, that man has done little more with his ability to reason than ‘improve and multiply those Vices, whereof [the Yahoos] had only the Share that Nature allotted them’ (260), training it on an inordinate lust for power, wealth, and intemperate desires of every kind. Gulliver’s discourse moves his Master finally to condemn man as worse than Animal: I was going on to more Particulars, when my Master commanded me Silence. He said, whoever understood the Nature of Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an Animal, to be capable of every Action I had named, if their Strength and Cunning equalled their Malice. But, as my Discourse had increased his Abhorrence of the whole Species, so he found it gave him a Disturbance in his Mind, to which he was wholly a Stranger before. He thought his Ears being used to such abominable Words, might by Degrees admit them with less Detestation. That, although he hated the Yahoos of this Country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious Qualities, than he did a Gnnayh (a Bird of Prey) for its Cruelty, or a sharp Stone for cutting his Hoof. But, when a Creature pretending to Reason, could be capable of such Enormities, he dreaded lest the Corruption of that Faculty might be worse than Brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident, that instead of Reason, we were only possessed of some Quality fitted to increase our natural Vices; as the Reflection from a troubled Stream returns the Image of an ill-shapen Body, not only larger, but more distorted. (230–1)

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Through the Master Houyhnhnm (in whose discourse one can hear the echo of the King of Brobdingnag), Swift arraigns man not for lacking reason, but for possessing it and misusing it. (As he famously wrote to Pope, ‘I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it should be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy … The whole building of my Travells is erected” [Swift to Pope, 29 September 1725, Correspondence 3:103].) Human reason trained upon natural vices ‘refines’ them, stirs and wakens them, resulting in acts of selfishness, malice, and cunning that are quintessentially human. The analogy – human reason is to vice as an ill-shapen body is to its magnified and distorted image in a ‘troubled Stream’ – is replicated in Gulliver’s recoil from his reflection in the mirror, a view he has been prepared for with great thoroughness by the critical Master Houyhnhnm: ‘When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person’ (260).36 Self-righteousness and self-hatred here – as in the remainder of Gulliver’s career – are curiously combined: Gulliver eagerly proselytizes for a cause that explicitly distorts and undermines him. It is also a gesture (one that Swift has shown before, in Brobdingnag, and, to a lesser degree, in Part Three, in Gulliver’s impatience at not occupying the centre of attention in Laputa) that is malignantly destructive to any possibility of progress: loathing himself for not being a Houyhnhnm, reduced to practicing an equine gait and manner in an attempt to elevate himself in his own opinion, Gulliver has radically misread the lesson of his own sojourn in Houyhnhnmland. Too fatigued (perhaps) to rearrange the terms of his own self-definition, he falls into the vacuum between Houyhnhnm and Yahoo. It is an abyss of darkness, of exile (and not from Houyhnhnmland alone), and of derangement. The derangement arises from the radical and exclusive way in which he defines the terms of his choice. It demands total isolation from humankind. In this hubristic (yet strangely abject) manner, Gulliver misses the clues to his own salvation, recoiling from Don Pedro’s patient and sensitive attempts to mollify and approach him. Gulliver’s action and talk (he hides behind a stone as his rescuers approach, and rebuffs their advances with lunatic babbling: ‘I was a poor Yahoo, banished from the Houyhnhnms’ [267]) make it no wonder that he is later likened to a speaking dog or cow. For this unconventional behaviour, he is tied with cords, and eventually chained, in a pattern all too familiar in the Travels, to his cabin. Swift is careful to paint Don Pedro as basically humane and kind, constructive without being prescriptive. (He tellingly advises Gulliver that ‘it was altogether impossible to find such a solitary Island as I had desired to live in; but I might command in my

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own House, and pass my time in a Manner as recluse as I pleased’ [270] – an option that Gulliver has entertained earlier [262–3; 265].) Don Pedro is like a Houyhnhnm, only more pleasant, and he passes out of the story in the modest and inoffensive way in which he entered, the lessons of his kindness effaced by those more strident and impossible ones of the Houyhnhnms, which Swift has Gulliver present to the reader in the insulting terms of the militant devotee: ‘I write for the noblest End, to inform and instruct Mankind, over whom I may, without Breach of Modesty, pretend to some Superiority, from the Advantages I received by conversing so long among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms’ (273–4). ‘Quod petis, est nusquam’ is the motto of Narcissus (Fox 22, 27). The fury of Gulliver’s hubris would be comic were the stakes not so high. Thrown between the exclusive definitions of Houyhnhnm and Yahoo, neither of which embraces the complexity of being human, Gulliver becomes ‘violent[ly] alienat[ed]’ from humankind, ‘his demand … for the absolute incapacitat[ing] him for … the ‘common routine’ of life – that feeling for the ordinary, the elemental, the enduring’ (Elliott 213). As always for Swift, it is the ‘space between’ that is so difficult to occupy or even to define: the arena of transition, of admixture, of paradox. This is the space in which change might be effected, in which metamorphosis could occur. But, as in ‘Baucis and Philemon,’ however earnestly objects may try to alter their shape and function, a higher physical law of dead recoil or of inertia seems to prevent any real transformation, and things snap back to their original dreary shape. The fear of deadlock motivates all of Swift’s seekers (Gulliver, Strephon, Cassinus), and the degree to which his questers cling, exhausted, to one pole or the other measures their inability to change and hence to instruct. Such a poetic universe, as Thomas Maresca has argued, turns in on itself: exaggerated, subjective, yet crudely reified. There is no ‘real’ world delineated against which the experiences of these proselytizers can be measured, or to which they may be applied (379). Bodies arouse and then ‘clog’ the imagination, preventing flights of fancy (like that of finding ‘hope’ at the bottom of Pandora’s box, impossible once the box has been likened to a chamber pot), arresting the self in an unproductive and isolated stasis (Gulliver in his stables, ‘Baucis and Philemon,’ Strephon).37 Gulliver at the end of the Travels is thus ‘racial[ly] arrogan[t],’ ‘rigidly fixed,’ inflexible, deluded, isolated (Nussbaum 322), the last figure from whom one would take counsel. And the last figure from whom one would expect poetry. If Swift and Yeats are at one in locating the foundation of the imagination in the body (‘I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ [‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1939)]), they differ in the degree to

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which each felt capable of building from and rising above it. Anchored professionally, as surgeon, in the world of the body, of matter, Gulliver also insists imaginatively on reifying, thinking that a life in the stable with horses is or approximates on some level life in Houyhnhnmland. But where Gulliver sniffs an odour of sanctity, the reader smells something else. Taine associated Swift’s attitude towards the natural world with that of Defoe: Swift, he wrote, had no ‘genuine sentiment of nature: he saw in the forests only logs of wood, and in the fields only sacks of corn’ (3: 231). But whereas Defoe perceives analogies between Crusoe’s physical activities and his spiritual growth on the island, Swift’s vision admits no such sheen. His objects shimmer with no spiritual light; there is in Gulliver’s Travels no upward path to give these things transcendent meaning. Swift realizes his world with the vividness (and sometimes symbolist energy) of a surrealist, anchoring his imagination to things (and events) that bear and obtrude with an almost palpable weight (the flying island, the sacks of objects carried round by the sages). In contrast to Pope or Thomson, he sees little physical beauty in the world. (Stella’s beauty is ‘mental’ and she had to forbear being depicted as an inn sign, a little cracked.) And a ‘translat[ion] downward,’ to the carnal, is inevitably the corrective to those indulging in visions of the ideal (D. Donoghue 206, 214). Swift’s world is one of sense and experience; he draws, as does Defoe, upon the solid and the concrete. But these are not qualities that are celebrated in any ‘poetic’ way; rather, they function as markers of the world’s fallenness – its abjection, almost, even its torpor. Thus, although Swift’s emphasis on things (and on visual perception)38 creates a world with ‘fibre,’ it is a world that challenges translation or any articulation out of the body. Swift’s world is too pushy, too vivid, too dense. Making from that world materials of the spirit or of poetry is difficult – hence the repeated references to Swift as a poet without idealism or ‘loft.’ In Leslie Stephen’s words, ‘Satire … is by its nature negative; it does not present a positive ideal … Lofty poetry can only spring from some inner positive enthusiasm’ (English Literature 119–20). James Russell Lowell, similarly, wrote of Swift’s ‘fatal gift’ as ‘an eye that disidealized’ (194). Taine complained of Swift’s relentless stripping away of illusion and beauty, the destructive energy that compelled him to level and degrade (3: 211–12). ‘Instead of concealing reality,’ Taine writes of Swift’s poetry, ‘it unveils it; instead of creating illusions, it removes them’ (3: 236). Swift is, for Taine’s taste, too clear-sighted (3: 247) to be a poet. Denis Donoghue’s observations about the ‘thingyness’ of Swift’s style are central to an understanding of how Swift’s imagination both perceives and expresses the world as he knows it: ‘Our impression of Swift’s prose is that

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the words are always ready to be tested in the light of facts, things, Nature. His style is not wordy, it is thingy’ (142–3); ‘Swift did not object to generality … but he had no interest in it’ (143). Swift’s concentration on surfaces and detail cements his vision with a density that permits no shuffling. It is not a vision that is superficial in any pejorative sense of the word but one that attributes to surfaces the last word: ‘Swift [in Denis Donoghue’s view] clings to surface, suspicious of depth. He makes no journey into the interior, for he is terrified of that unknown place. He does not wish to secrete himself within the object or the experience: it is safer to stand, as a surveyor, in front of them … Swift’s characters are not “profound”; because the word implies not only the risk of depth but the will to risk that depth … [I]n Swift’s visionary world vision has done everything it is allowed to do when it has asserted the separation of one thing from another’ (80–1). Swift’s interest in the relationship of words and things (as seen in the project to abolish language altogether and to carry about objects with which one would conduct conversations) suggests not only his unusual compulsion for clarity but also his reluctance to ‘invest’ matter with language that might blur or beautify its boundaries. Such a militant rejection of illusion is part of Swift’s uncompromising realism as well as his imaginative need for ‘outline.’ Swift’s refusal to exalt, his pessimistic ideological commitment to the fallen world of matter, has led to his denomination as a kind of ‘anti-poet’ (Fischer, ‘Introduction’ 13; San Juan) whose view of the poetic imagination is ‘uncompromisingly hostile’ (Quintana 276).39 Though Swift is happy to spin analogies, such operations depend on the maintenance of frames that can stay rigid enough to produce the shock he desires (as in the likening, in ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room,’ of a chamber pot to Pandora’s box). Energized by the couplet, which ‘allowed him to direct a flow of energy through single meanings and finite relationships’ (D. Donoghue 192), Swift’s poetry takes on a thumping force, undissipated by metaphoric dissolutions: ‘If there is one thing clear about Swift,’ writes Adams, ‘it is the high tension at which his mind operated, its impatient energy, the tendency to dominate and use intellectual materials. His prose, even when polished to a high gloss, is always muscular; and its muscles are always at work’ (147). As in the interstices between journeys when the traveller brings home the good news, so with the cranky, would-be metamorphoses in ‘Baucis and Philemon,’ the dissolution of outline is not part of Swift’s poetic world. His prose, ‘bold, hard, angular’ (Adams 146), shows a ‘[distrust of] the vague, transitional moments, when a thing is neither fully itself nor something else. He is restless with things that do not maintain their own identity’ (D. Donoghue 191).40 As if to prove this point, much of Swift’s poetry (and Gulliver’s Trav-

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els) has to do with ‘ineffectual metamorphoses,’ in which Swift often creates humour and stalls change by a deliberate confusion of tenor and vehicle (Vieth 59, 60; the mock-epic simile in ‘A Description of a City Shower’). The intellect breaks in and plays its hostile games, causing ‘pain and revulsion’ as it ‘[scrutinizes] what is better left unexamined’ (P. Rogers, ‘Gulliver’s Glasses’ 187). This is Taine’s clear-sightedness, which disqualifies Swift from being a poet. This stripping of illusion is often a highly antagonistic project that debunks and ‘realizes’ in a way that is distinctive to Swift. (One does not, tellingly, feel the retaliatory force of the material world to such an insistent degree in Defoe.) One of his favourite procedures is a reduction to the ‘thingness’ of thoughts, a literalization that renders the human project of idealizing ridiculous. Thus, the two opposing parties in Lilliput, Tramecksan and Slamecksan, argue furiously over the height of heels (42) – and these are literal measurements, not ‘ideological’ ones. Similarly, an internecine battle has erupted over whether eggs should be broken at the larger or the smaller end (43), and Swift goes into detail describing ‘that infamous Practice of acquiring great Employments by dancing on the Ropes, or Badges of Favour and Distinction by leaping over Sticks, and creeping under them’ (54). As the reader labours to read these passages (such as that of the King’s cushion) as political allegories (which, to a certain extent, they certainly are), their more immediate humour arises from defying that procedure, from insisting on the debased and ‘stalled’ literalness of such scenes. Swift’s description of the governmental decoding of suspect documents shows how his humour is based on reverse translation of this kind: These Papers are delivered to a Set of Artists very dextrous in finding out the mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables and Letters. For instance, they can decypher a Close-stool to signify a Privy-Council; a Flock of Geese, a Senate; a lame Dog, an Invader; the Plague, a standing Army; a Buzzard, a Minister; the Gout, a high Priest; a Gibbet, a Secretary of State; a Chamber pot, a Committee of Grandees; a Sieve, a Court Lady; a Broom, a Revolution; a Mouse-trap, an Employment; a bottomless Pit, the Treasury; a Sink, a C——t; a Cap and Bells, a Favourite; a broken Reed, a Court of Justice; an empty Tun, a General; a running Sore, the Administration. (179)

Similarly, a letter that reads, ‘Our Brother Tom has just got the Piles’ (179) has a ‘political [Meaning]’ (179), but the significance does not arise from the sentence so much as revert back to it.41 If the causes of war can be attributed to the arbitrary demands of those who assign (possibly arbitrary) meaning to innocent (?) objects, we are potentially involved in a universe with no absolutes – and hence no possibility for discovering truth or ‘right[ness]’ – or in one that

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is so absurd as to disqualify man from seeking and attributing any meaning at all: ‘Whether Flesh be Bread, or Bread be Flesh; Whether the Juice of a certain Berry be Blood or Wine: Whether Whistling be a Vice or a Virtue: Whether it be better to kiss a Post, or throw it into the Fire’ (229).42 Certainly, there is a pragmatic edge to Swift, a sense in which the ultimate test of any ideology is whether it is rational or useful (as is displayed in the practicality of Lord Munodi, and the concerns about the Academy of Lagado; the King of Brobdingnag, in this regard, with his antipathy towards ‘Ideas, Entitities, Abstractions and Transcendentals’ [125], serves as a model ruler), not whether it is high flying (as are the schemes of the Academy of Lagado). Recall the fury with which Swift prescribes the sawing off of occiputs to promote concord among politicians or the cannibal scheme of A Modest Proposal. There seems little doubt that a literal realization of the former project would bring pleasure to Swift, and that he finds the prospect of such an operation funny is clear. The humour in both instances is that of the dare, the ‘they ought to be shot’ variety discussed by Rawson (God). Once the rage of the punishment is meted out (bodily, analytically), the analogical method permanently breaks down, for the translation back into more abstract modes of thinking can no longer be effected once ‘rock bottom,’ as it were, is hit. Once a concept has been ‘mechanized,’ as in Swift’s Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, it is difficult to restore it to a more dignified plane. Such rude and spectacular play along the surfaces accounts for the vividness of Swift’s style and images. There are, in Denis Donoghue’s analysis, ‘no loose edges’ in Swift’s prose, no blurring of lineaments in his figures. Swift’s humour depends upon an understanding of classifications and of perimeters, which he deploys by yoking together heterogeneous ideas in lists or catalogues that generate shock through collision. (Concepts could not forcefully collide in this way were their outlines not to stay intact.) What results are ‘dramas of conjunction’ (D. Donoghue 71), lists or catalogues in which Swift sets up equations that challenge the right of the ‘high’ to exist on a plane separate from that of the ‘low’: ‘No Lords, Fiddlers, Judges or Dancing-masters’ (259). In this recitation of personages who are absent from Gulliver’s utopia, humour arises both from the unexpectedness and from the proximity of each entry to its neighbour. Swift’s lists and analogies (often energized by his favourite connective, ‘but’ [Milic 126]) are adversarial, designed to stir up trouble. In a certain sense, they reverse (because they order) the gross and turbulent discharges of the Yahoos; in that sense they are more damaging still. For Swift, the body and the senses root man in a physical, fallen world that will come to be inextricably associated with the novel. But if Swift anticipates a novelistic treatment of the body in Gulliver’s Travels, he also forecasts the

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difficulties that writers will experience in rendering their concerns in bodily ways. From Swift’s position, the material realm by definition mocks any pretence to idealizing and blocks any route to the beyond. It is a world of weight, of clog, and clutter, one in which the laws of gravity trump those of aspiration. Yet it is also, confusingly, a world in which the pursuit of an ideal that would elevate man above the mundane and the secular seems an evasion of responsibility, which rests in self-governance and the support of political systems that seek the public good. On the rare occasions in which Swift embodies his ideals (as in the fictional Don Pedro and in the real Stella), they tend to be modest and unassuming, not grandly theatrical like Defoe’s avenging angel or ambiguously charged like the appearance of the footprint. No ineffable lurks inside Swift’s persons or objects. Swift’s Gulliver is set up not for spiritual salvation or transfiguration but (more modestly) for becoming a wiser citizen of the world. That he fails in this endeavour, literally recreating in his own stable what he must think is a version of Houyhnhnmland, may evidence his shock at his transition back to the cave, but it also fatally proves his inability to invest his life with the deeper reading of his experiences that has been made available to him through his travels. He thus corroborates Swift’s dark view of the fundamental antipathy of ideal and real, a vision of discord that, wilfully or not, will continue to pose some of the deepest ideological and stylistic challenges to the writers of fiction who will succeed him.

3 Clarissa: Grace

How this body clings! – How it encumbers! Clarissa

At the conclusion of Clarissa, conveying the news of Lovelace’s ‘unhappy end’ (1489),1 Lovelace’s travelling valet De la Tour delivers the details of his employer’s demise. De la Tour’s account has a blasé air: the references to Lovelace as ‘my dear chevalier’ (1486–7) and ‘poor gentleman’ (1488) sound hollow, and his unfamiliarity with his master’s story causes him to shrug off Lovelace’s invocations to Clarissa in a desultory way, with an incurious reference to her as ‘some lady (that Clarissa, I suppose)’ (1487). De la Tour’s interpretation of Lovelace’s last words is among the most blatant misreadings of any in a novel that thematizes the ‘struggles of interpretation’:2 he opines smoothly that Lovelace’s theatrical and sacrilegious ‘LET THIS EXPIATE’ reflects ‘an ultimate composure; which may administer some consolation to his honourable friends’ (1487). This pious gloss, worthy of Brontë’s Nelly, is an obtrusion – at once servile and shockingly insolent – of a piece with his subsequent decision to eviscerate Lovelace’s body and deposit it in a vault until he receives Belford’s final commands about the disposal of his friend’s remains. Lovelace is ‘anatomized’ and his carcass stashed much in the same simultaneously businesslike and venal way as De la Tour’s request for reimbursement for the expenditures that he has been forced to make to the Magistracy on account of the manner of Lovelace’s death. Lovelace’s end, indeed, is marked by corruption, indifference, and misinterpretation, a combination of states that does little to resolve those issues of reparation and justice with which the latter part of Richardson’s novel has been so largely concerned. The letters in fact end much as they began: in the aftermath of physical violence, financial anxiety,

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and estrangement – an atmosphere elaborated by Belford’s closing account of the marital, legal, and medical tribulations of the Harlowe family and its ménage. ‘She forgives my sin!’ exclaims Lovelace to Belford long after the rape. ‘She accepts my repentance! But she won’t let me repair!’ (1208). Richardson’s refusal, despite his readers’ pleas that he reward Clarissa’s sufferings with happiness in the mortal world,3 to bring his novel to a ‘fortunate’ conclusion (1495) suggests, as Tom Keymer has argued, the bleakness of Richardson’s theological vision and his grim dismissal of the possibilities of earthly justice (Richardson’s Clarissa 207–14). The world at his novel’s end – still entangled, as the duel and the unhappy careers of the principal Harlowes prove, in the relations of hierarchy and corruption that initiated Clarissa’s tragedy – is so irremediably enmired in sin that, like Lovelace, or the dog in the fable, it is doomed to return to its own vomit, to reinstate endlessly and violently the cycle of its own corruption. Expiation is, finally, not possible – certainly not for Lovelace, for whom it is simply a histrionic gesture underscoring his melodramatic sense of his own importance in his final scene. But, more profoundly, as action, according to Richardson, is tied in a complex and perhaps intrinsic way to sin, kicking free of the webs of deceit and power through a theatrical display of atonement, as Lovelace tries to do, of ‘paying off,’ or paying up, is a form of spiritual bartering that is not Heaven’s way, that recalls and replays his tortured relationship to Clarissa, whom he uses both as occasion for sinning and as a ‘sponge’ to erase his sins (757, 847). Such a Lovelacean world – in which the victim pays and the criminal gets off free, in which sin never ‘sticks’ because it is weighed relatively, as if on a kind of scoreboard (‘What dost hate me for, Belford?’ Lovelace writes to his friend after the rape. ‘– And why more and more? – Have I been guilty of any offense thou knewest not before?’ [1107]), and justification for sin may be effected retroactively, by the commission of deeper sins – is anti-Christian to the core. It is precisely this realization, as Keymer has noted, that so stirred Richardson’s readers. Refusing to repair this view of universal disorder by a facile reconciliation of his two protagonists (such a resolution, as Clarissa points out after the rape, would simply ‘sanctify … Lovelace’s repeated breaches of all moral sanctions’ [1141]), Richardson dashes Clarissa’s hopes for earthly happiness, guaranteeing her translation to a higher realm, but at the expense of a kind of ‘local chaos,’ a deeply pessimistic view of the possibilities of justice ‘here below’ (Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, 15 December 1748, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson 108). In a striking inversion of Defoe, moral message unstrings the romance plot: Lovelace’s and Clarissa’s tragedy unsettles any facile sense of order in the lower world. The damages in its wake, as much personal (bodily, emotional)

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as they are spiritual and social, are rooted unequivocally in the materiality of Richardson’s world and in the divisiveness and instability that are its social signs. To be born into such a sphere – ruthless, predacious, acquisitive – is to be swept up in a system that has relinquished all pretence to a moral or spiritual code. As is the case with Swift, whose drive for purity and whose anxiety about corporeality Richardson inherits, the search for an ideal order collapses in the face of the materiality of the body and the demands of physical laws. The ‘higher’ self embodied is made infirm: in contact with other bodies and wills, compelled to chart its course across a dynamic field, its stability is repeatedly threatened. Richardson’s strongest characters (Clarissa, Lovelace), under the pressure of social and physical intercourse, unable to forestall the assignment of identities and motives from the outside, are thus made malleable and permeable to the degree that they may become fundamentally self-estranged. The integration of worldly and otherworldly realms towards which Defoe and Swift strive is thus here again baffled, both in the civic sphere and on the level of the individual person: though Richardson offers, in Clarissa, repeated, vivid evidence that heaven is attainable on earth (Clarissa is indeed, as Lovelace complains [705], the embodiment of all that is sacred), Richardson’s world (like that of Swift) is too self-absorbed and envious to accommodate such an ideal. And Clarissa herself, drawn into the maelstrom of social and economic relations that mark her class, cannot maintain the balance that is required for her to live a life of integrity. In his concern with the interior dynamics of such imbalance, Richardson, in Clarissa, thus shifts the domain of the problem of body and soul articulated by Defoe and Swift from a largely theological or political arena to a more personal sphere (though the issue of the personal body clearly has repercussions in the public and the spiritual sectors). If the protagonists of Defoe and Swift are encumbered by bodies that clog and divert their aspirations to a higher realm, Richardson’s Clarissa, who embodies virtue, falls victim to a world that no longer seeks such embodiment, that splits body from soul and then enfranchises the body at the spirit’s expense. To hold or to aspire to ideals (such as love, purity, and equality) in a world that is as grimly actual as that of Richardson is to invite an attenuation of focus that will alienate body and soul, increasing the body’s exposure to the encroachments of others and precipitating a loss of control within the self that will eventually license the body to perform independently of the will. In delineating such a breakdown, Richardson anticipates one of the central concerns of Shelley in Frankenstein, that the body has laws that are not those of the spirit, that flesh, devoid of soul, has a modus operandi of its own. ‘What a poor, passive machine is the body,’ Clarissa complains as she descends the stairs for the dreaded interview with Solmes, ‘when the mind is disordered’

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(303). Both Solmes and Lovelace, ‘tools’ of the Harlowes, are described in ways that call attention to their mechanistic nature, to their soullessness and also to their peculiar motility or weight. Indeed, these qualities appear in Richardson’s view to be connected: characters (such as Clarissa) who are ‘ensouled,’ who seek to live a conjointly spiritual and corporeal life, experience a radical diminution of power. Richardson’s characters – including Clarissa – are profoundly, almost terminally embodied; pressed forward by circumstance, caught up in confusing networks of family relationships, they have no recourse (as is demonstrated by Clarissa’s futile search for a haven of repose) but physically to act or to be acted upon. To be embodied in such a sphere, as Clarissa learns when Solmes presses his ugly weight against her hoop, is at once to be constrained (‘entangled,’ ‘confined,’ ‘encumber[ed]’) and to be marked for incursions of an intimate and a sexual kind. That Clarissa must make her way in a world that categorically refuses homage to the spirit and that, though it privileges the body, does not honour it, that neither recognizes the dignity of the body nor respects its need for privacy, marks her course as tragic and identifies her tragedy as tied directly to those problems of embodiment that were earlier adumbrated by Defoe and Swift. On the most fundamental level, interestingly, one of the chief difficulties of embodiment articulated by Defoe and Swift (the ‘mechanics,’ as it were, of the enterprise) seems momentarily in Clarissa to have been resolved. As is the case with Fielding’s Sophia, Clarissa’s virtue is realized in her physical beauty, in the grace and richness of her deportment, and in the sensibility of her mind. Her love and spirituality exalt and transfigure her, transporting her beyond Lovelace’s promiscuous gaze. Richardson makes clear, however, in his careful representations of Clarissa ‘from the outside,’ that in a vitiated world such perfection is bound to be read erotically, spectacularly. Thus, Lovelace’s description of Clarissa at the unbolted gate, her ‘wax-like flesh … all glowing, all charming flesh and blood … every meandering vein … to be seen in all the lovely parts of her which custom permits to be visible’ (399), shocks the reader in the invasiveness of its view, in the violation of a bodily integrity that the reader has been trained to respect. The transparency that Lovelace insists upon here – and indeed, on a certain important level, enacts – not only establishes Clarissa as victim but also reaffirms the fact that her body is a conduit to an exquisite sensibility within. (It also exposes the damaging degree to which physical identities may be imposed from without: the reader is offered no detailed alternative picture with which this representation may be counteracted.) Clarissa’s moral and spiritual nobility irradiates her, just as Mrs Sinclair’s deformity (her masculine, even bestial crudeness and grotesqueness) signals the Widow’s moral corruption. Indeed, the body unirradiated, as the

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vile end of Mrs Sinclair aptly demonstrates, is ugly. Mrs Sinclair, grunting and howling on her couch of death surrounded by the dishevelled sisterhood, calls the reader’s attention, unwillingly, to suppressed details of the rape of Clarissa: bodily transactions devoid of reverence are grotesque in a Swiftian way (the likeness certified by Richardson’s specific invocation of Swift in this scene); the body without spirit disgusts and repels. Physical passion, devoid of respect, disfigures, as Clarissa notes in her description to Anna Howe of Lovelace’s turbulent approaches: ‘The man, my dear, looked quite ugly’ (643). In the predatory world of Richardson’s novel, in which humans strive chiefly to subjugate and to dominate others, the body is the first line of defence protecting the will, and those who desire mastery will batter against the body in an attempt to get at its seat. In this state of warfare (in which families and suitors compete for dominance, and in which wives and daughters, stakes in the contest of love, are forced to adopt a primarily defensive stance), it is the location and accessibility of the will (volition, desire, which Richardson associates with the spirit) that concern Richardson most intensely. Clarissa is thus a rape narrative in the most profound sense, underscoring, as Richardson repeatedly replays the central scene of Clarissa’s violation (forecasting it in the forcible treatment of Clarissa by her family, in the scene at the garden gate, recounting it after the fact, and replaying it in the scenes of Mrs Sinclair on her bed of death) his investment in those issues of forcible intimacy that will concern Inchbald towards the century’s end: What is the relationship of the will or desire to the body? How does one gain access, if at all, to a woman’s soul? How can one, if at all, protect one’s autonomy and exercise free will in a world that is fallen and in which ideas of authority are contested? That we see in Clarissa glimpses of a conjunction of earthly and heavenly beauty figured in the body makes her tragedy all the more acute. Under the pressure of a world that exerts merciless claims upon the body, the unity of soul and body is inevitably rent. It is not so much that mind and body are ‘unequal,’ in ‘confederacy,’ at war, as Anna Howe complains (475) (although Richardson is interested in this disjunction in his exploration of Clarissa’s susceptibility to Lovelace), but that the body itself breaks down in its attempt to protect the soul or deeper self against a world that is determined to demean it. Lovelace engineers such a breakdown, seeking Clarissa in part for the spiritual richness and equilibrium that are reflected in the grace of her personal beauty. His unwillingness to admit to his own spiritual needs and the momentum of the identity imposed upon him by his creed of libertinism mean that his quest will take a hostile turn, a tyrannic and ultimately uncontrollable impulse (like that of Satan) to destroy goodness itself. Lovelace, who invests meaning (or power, at any rate) in the body, errs in

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assuming that his physical appropriation of Clarissa can in some way gain him intellectual, moral, and spiritual dominion over her. His inability to construe their relationship in any but the most conventional terms of dominance and subjection impels him to take out his spiritual urges physically in destructive acts of encroachment and violation. To centre the self in the body in the way that Lovelace does, to reject the concept of a soul and the idea of divine authority that it implies, is to experience a heady feeling of mastery. But such a sense of freedom is illusory, as Richardson repeatedly points out in the mechanistic and entangling imagery that he assigns to Lovelace. Nor is Clarissa, whose sense of self is clearer and more composite, afforded more freedom, in the mortal world at least. Instead, she is repeatedly subjected to the violatory impulses of those who surround her. And at such charged moments of infringement (Solmes, the garden gate, the rape), we see that body and will are not only ‘not equal’ (in the sense that Clarissa’s will cannot apparently ‘overrule’ the actions of her own body) but also perhaps not intrinsic, that the body can be acted upon, and can act, without the will’s involvement and consent. It is only, tragically, in the deliberate preparation for death that preoccupies Clarissa towards the novel’s close that Clarissa’s will and body cooperate in any sustained or controlled way. Her physical decline thus, paradoxically, represents the height of her power, as she has detached herself from a world that, synonymizing will and action, persists in reading what she has ‘done’ as wilful and true. Clarissa’s account of what happened at the garden gate (she was, she repeatedly says, ‘tricked out of [her]self’) makes clear that, according to Richardson, one can ‘do’ without the ratification or even participation of the self; at a moment in which self and body are estranged, the body continues to act. If Clarissa at this moment is ‘tricked out of [her]self,’ this arresting figure suggests not only that she has been made victim of a device or plot (‘tricked’), but also that self and body can disjoin: the image suggests an effect of eversion, in which the self has been ejected from the body and from its proper position of command. (The configuration recalls that of Defoe in his exegesis on the soul; see p. 25 above.) If self and body can be detached in this way, truth of self may have little to do with the body at all, but may lie more remotely elsewhere. As Lovelace encroaches more and more deeply upon his victim, the embattled self retreats into an inviolable space that is not only beyond the body but also must finally reject it in a profound and complex way. Thus Clarissa’s lifeless body, as it is moved from place to place at the novel’s close (arousing in Lovelace and in her family desperate accesses of passion and remorse), shows how reserves of power still inhabit her frame, but also how inaccessible is (and has always been) her living will.4 Her truest power, incontestable finally in death, resonates – significantly – through her disembodied will, the document that particularizes the disposal of her effects and,

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more consequentially, identifies the value of the novel’s characters and dictates Lovelace’s end. It is, tragically, at these moments (dead, and at the time of the rape) that Clarissa is most autonomous and most free. In Clarissa Richardson focuses sharply on issues of agency, casting into doubt the possibility of realizing independence and integrity in the mortal world. For both Clarissa and Lovelace, the body hampers in a mysterious and repeated way the attainment of freedom on earth. Their world, which compels action, is primed and netted with gins and snares that complicate and divert intention and movement. This is an arena in which only the refractive and the theatrical, the spontaneous, the deeply imaginative, may prosper. But the hyperactivity that is demanded by such a place (as Lovelace and his infernal helpers and James learn to their cost) is temporal and finally self-entangling. As Clarissa takes over the novel’s latter half, she proves the limits of Lovelace’s view. The debates of soul and body initiated by Defoe and Swift are thus here socialized and accelerated. Richardson both expands their range and intensifies their pressure, arguing for the difficulty of holding oneself outside the fevered world of corporeality and action and, in an anticipation of Inchbald, for the body’s complicity in the restriction of personal freedom and in the breakdown of any system of mutuality outside (or even within) the self. Unhampered by moral, social, and religious codes, the libertine Lovelace appears to move in a medium of unalloyed freedom; living a life of the imagination, to which the real world seems repeatedly to bend, there are, apparently, no limits to what he can do. Money is no object; people move at his pleasure; ‘fact is not stubborn for him’ (Preston 81).5 He refers to himself and the scope of his enterprises continually in imperial terms: he is ‘general,’ ‘commander,’ ‘emperor.’ He pursues ‘openly,’ Margaret Anne Doody has argued, ‘a life of Hobbist domination’ (A Natural Passion 124).6 Yet, as Preston (83–6) and others have pointed out, Lovelace’s liberty is at bottom deeply illusory. Rakes, Belford reminds his libertine friend, are enslaved by their own code: they ‘move round and round (like so many blind mill-horses) in one narrow circle, while [they] imagine [they] have all the world to range in’ (1131). Mutability and transgression, in any event, are hardly synonymous with freedom, and the novel, in fact, charts a decline of rakish power that begins well before the rape.7 Lovelace’s acts of blasphemous self-sufficiency – and the collapse of social and ethical codes that such exercises entail – whirl him into a realm in which all bearings of morality and character have been lost, in which ‘control’ in its root sense is no longer possible. Lovelace inhabits a kind of limbo, in which exercises of the imagination, ‘stand-ins’ for action in the ‘real’ world, have finally become too diffuse and prodigious to be enfranchising.8 Imprisoned in this specious freedom, directionless because, like Satan, he is hell, Lovelace

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searches in Clarissa for some resolution, some surcease to the relentless energies that eventually consume him.9 In this regard, his pompous ‘I can go no farther’ is an expression of ardent spiritual desire rather than erotic exhaustion or rakish understatement. Lovelace’s preference for the ‘seduction progress’ over the ‘crowning act’ (616), for the ‘chase’ over the ‘venison’ (557–8) (‘Such a joy,’ he crows to Belford, ‘when any roguery is going forward!’ [520]), shows that predation satisfies because it never ends, that the pleasures of sinful perpetration lie precisely in the act (not the fruits) of commission. For the true libertine, ‘Preparation and expectation are … everything,’ as Lovelace remarks to Belford, ‘but the fruition, what is there in that?’ (163).10 To ‘succeed’ under such a rubric is to fail, so the self must ceaselessly launch itself forward on its quest for difficulties and opposition. This restless need for self-stimulation suggests both the magnitude of Lovelace’s sin and the urgency of his spiritual needs. Lovelace’s insatiability, figured sexually and emotionally as a desire to subjugate all women, marks his soul as damned. Nothing is ever ‘over,’ ever ‘enough.’ He compromises Clarissa by engaging her in a clandestine correspondence. Wringing from her a promise not to marry Solmes, he forces her to elope with him, then to endure his cohabitation, then his encroachments, and, finally, he rapes her. This crime issues in further designs: plans for a second violation, hopes for illegitimate offspring.11 In the early stages of their association, Lovelace receives ample evidence of Clarissa’s love and compliance, and he wilfully ignores these signs in favour of a deeper possession, a more profound penetration. Lovelace climbs a type of ladder of exemplary wickedness, and the rungs drop out from under him as he ascends. As there are (desperately) no limits to his desires, there is effectively no end point to his need for pardon, as his belligerent demands for forgiveness after the fire scene demonstrate (726–7, 734–5). It is his ability to sin and be forgiven, not Clarissa’s virtue, that is on frantic trial; it is the outrageous effacement of those sins that hideously ‘justifies’ him at the expense of all moral order or right: ‘At this silent moment [Lovelace writes meditatively to Belford, weighing his intentions in regard to Clarissa], I think that if I were to pursue my former scheme, and resolve to try whether I cannot make a greater fault serve as a sponge to wipe out a less; and then be forgiven for that; I can justify myself to myself; and that, as the fair implacable would say, is all in all’ (847). Lovelace’s shocking formula of self-justification is not only an explicit travesty of Clarissa’s code of self-ratification, of an integrity that justifies and ennobles the self, but also a recommendation of contingencies against absolutes, a system of moral degeneration that, anarchically and paradoxically, is held together by transgression. ‘It is said,’ writes Belford to Lovelace, pleading for

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Clarissa, ‘that the prince on his throne is not safe if a mind so desperate can be found as values not its own life. So may it be said that the most immaculate virtue is not safe, if a man can be met with who has no regard to his own honour’ (605).12 Caught in this self-made vortex of moral collapse, Lovelace longs for absolution, for rest, ‘to be forgiven for ever’ (575): ‘Oh that she would forgive me!’ he exclaims feverishly to Belford after his confrontation with his majestic victim after the rape. ‘– Would she but generously forgive me, and receive my vows at the altar, at the instant of her forgiving me, that I might not have time to relapse into my old prejudices!’ (930). But such an act of violent cleansing, of hot impress,13 will neither purify Lovelace nor, horrendously (as the image of the sponge suggests), let Clarissa escape unstained. It is no wonder that, as Lovelace pursues his plots against Clarissa, his desire seems increasingly to be forgiveness (838, 847, 879, 886, 904) rather than trial or revenge. ‘Your angelic purity, and my awakened conscience,’ Lovelace writes desperately to Clarissa in this strain on August 7, ‘are standing records of your exalted merit and of my detestable baseness: but your forgiveness will lay me under an eternal obligation to you – Forgive me then, my dearest life, my earthly good, the visible anchor of my future hope! … in YOUR forgiveness, are centred my hopes as to both worlds’ (1185). ‘What sensibilities,’ Clarissa laments to Lovelace in Mrs Moore’s garden, ‘must thou have suppressed! – What a dreadful, what a judicial hardness of heart must thine be; who canst be capable of such emotions as sometimes thou hast shown; and of such sentiments as sometimes have flowed from thy lips; yet canst have so far overcome them all as to be able to act as thou hast acted, and that from settled purpose and premeditation; and this, as it is said, throughout the whole of thy life, from infancy to this time!’ (852). Lovelace’s deliberate suppression of his own goodness, his choice to enact, instead, those hostile and tyrannical urges that ‘normal’ men repress,14 is, as with Milton’s Satan, what simultaneously torments him and confers on him his identity, what propels him, triumphantly and agonizingly, above the realm of the ordinary.15 In Clarissa Lovelace searches for the redemption he knows he needs, the punishment he knows he deserves, for such a radical and bodily assertion of the self’s desires. His wish, ultimately, is for a kind of unconsciousness, a cessation of stimulants that he finally achieves in the duel with Colonel Morden. Like Macbeth after the murder of Banquo, Lovelace feels before the rape that he has gone too far to recede, and hurtles to his own doom in a confused relinquishment of self-command, ‘a machine at last, and no free agent’ (848). Such passivity comes about not because there is ‘fate,’ as Macbeth entertains, but because the conscious reflection of what he is doing has become intolerable – hence the murder of his conscience (‘Take that … ! … Welter on! – Had I not

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given thee thy death’s wound, thou wouldst have robbed me of all my joys’ [848]). Such an act, to Richardson, in a world that continually threatens to curtail and abrogate freedom, however fervently wished, is the ultimate sin: a voluntary extinction of the will. In Lovelace’s complex enterprise of sinning to seize absolution, of torturing to gain forgiveness, he resembles no one so much as Chaucer’s Pardoner, whose candour is simultaneously his triumph and his deepest failure, who sins grossly so that he may be more deeply redeemed, and whose singling out of Harry Bailly reveals the urgency of his need to break the cycle of his powerful sinfulness through punishment or grace. But for both Lovelace and the Pardoner, the grievousness of their sins (and the transient nature of their ‘repentance’) make pardon unthinkable. Though the Host’s acquiescence in the corrupt churchman’s game might in theory ‘forgive,’ justify, or ‘socialize’ the Pardoner, the end result would be a course of further evils, a moral collapse in which all would be complicit. Clarissa’s forgiveness of Lovelace would, in kind, merely license him to perpetrate further and deeper insults against her person, would, as she maintains towards the novel’s end, merely sanction Lovelace’s breaches of all moral codes (1141). Forgiveness, in any case, is a concept foreign to Lovelace, who can feel loss but not compunction and for whom failure simply becomes the occasion for a more frenzied reactivation of his destructive energies. Lovelace’s egoism means that those energies will eventually turn against the self (as, indeed, they are trained against his self’s deepest needs throughout the novel). The arena for Lovelace’s power is nearly limitless – his sexual conquests extend from rural England to the continent; he appears to possess power over even the elements16 – and it is precisely here that Richardson situates his tragedy. The imagination – unleashed and licensed by a society that abets predation – proves Lovelace as all-powerful: hence, his repeated references to himself as emperor, director, king. No social or legal force steps in to prevent Lovelace from harming Clarissa. The Harlowe family aids his misconduct – indeed, it provides the occasion for it and ‘works for him’ throughout, as Lovelace exultantly declares. Clarissa’s friends and sympathizers are strangely paralyzed (by illness, by familial duties, or by Lovelace’s devices) from acting in her behalf. The law, as Lovelace and Clarissa both realize, will not repair Lovelace’s crime.17 Spiritual assistance – in the form of Dr Lewen or Dr Brand – is rendered ineffectual through weakness or corruption. Everyone in the novel, whether by act or by failure to act, seems to sanction, even promote, Lovelace’s designs. Despising such weakness, Lovelace naturally relocates power in the self, and nothing he experiences (except Clarissa) suggests that he is mistaken. He attaches himself to her largely to prove that he is wrong. Imaginative freedom leads inexorably, as with Robinson Crusoe,

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to tyranny, and as with Frankenstein, to transgression. It is with such issues of power and their refraction through the self that Richardson’s novel is most deeply concerned. The central question of the self in Clarissa is this: how, in a world in which all is subject to the demands of power,18 in which one is threatened with absorption into a welter of illicit hopes and desires, can one keep the self free, inviolate, discrete? Richardson examines this question both within the context of the private relationship, in which issues of integrity are at stake, and within the larger context of the family and society. In the first instance, he is primarily concerned with issues of autonomy; in the second with the possibility of proper action. ‘What struck the patriarchal Freud as particularly regressive in women,’ Terry Eagleton has remarked in defence of Clarissa’s self-complacency, ‘– their “cat-like” proneness to sensual self-delight, their cool, self-fulfilling independence of male desire – are precisely the qualities which patriarchy is unable to countenance’ (73).19 Clarissa is just such a woman: her most celebrated qualities, in keeping with the desired conventions of her age, are the ‘absorptive,’ retractive ones of delicacy and modesty. She does not thrust herself into public view, and is content with her contracted domestic circuit of household duties, and with her quiet pursuits of writing and reading. The first letter of the novel locates her, vulnerably, outside of those spheres, the focus of public talk, ‘hurt,’ as Anna Howe reasonably supposes, at the exposure that has ensued as a result of the duel between Lovelace and her brother (39). Clarissa’s desire to ‘[slide] through life to the end of it unnoted … [unobserved]’ (40) is also her wish to keep herself remote, contained, untouched. Lovelace is repeatedly rankled at her withdrawals and her silences, at her ‘reserves’ (‘Would she but speak out, as I do,’ he complains to Belford [414]), at her impenetrability (145).20 Clarissa’s self-absorption is not, as Lovelace and her family complain, a display of sullen self-pity, or, as some of Clarissa’s detractors have argued, complacence or physical prudishness, but symptomatic of her desire for an exact understanding about the self and its emotions. When Clarissa writes, as she advises Anna Howe, she enters ‘into compact with myself’ (483);21 her self-knowledge and self-command (which repeatedly awe Lovelace, and cause him to make her letters as much as her body the subject of his violation)22 manifest themselves in an emotional precision that is unsparing of herself and Lovelace. ‘I think I hate you,’ she tells Lovelace after some particularly offensive encroachments. ‘And if, upon a re-examination of my own heart, I find I do, I would not for the world that matters should go on farther between us’ (653). It is false that, as Samuel Johnson remarked, ‘there is always something which [Clarissa] prefers to truth’ (Piozzi 134). Despite (or perhaps because

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of) the fact that ‘truth’ of self is, obviously, difficult or painful to retrieve,23 though ‘Self … is the grand misleader’ (IV, 197), Clarissa strives, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has pointed out,24 particularly in her correspondence with Anna Howe, for an attitude of radical openness, charging her to require of her both candour and clarity. She presses Anna to be similarly exacting in her letters, urging her friend to go to the ‘quick of [her] fault’ and likening her spirited teasing to the probing of a surgeon’s lancet, intended to cure (280). Clarissa labours, as Richardson took particular pains to emphasize in the second and third editions of the novel, to ‘detect herself,’ to root out the sin of ‘presumptuous self-security’ (IV, 197) and replace it with utter clarity of self-knowledge. Clarissa learns early in her transactions with Lovelace that seeking and then protecting her authenticity in this way (or indeed in any other way) is nearly impossible. Her hopeful notion of the married state as a state of probity (and not of ‘licentiousness’ [703], of respect as opposed to transgression) is greeted with the expected guffaw from the worldly Lovelace: ‘Marriage purity, Jack! – Very comical ’faith’ (703). The self is besmirched by virtue of its associations – willed or not – with the evil and hostility that are the hallmarks of the fallen world: ‘Who can touch pitch,’ as Clarissa complains to Mrs Smith and Mrs Lovick, ‘and not be defiled?’ (1272). Clarissa’s concern for her ‘reputation’ after her elopement with Lovelace reflects this same sense that the self is deeply subject to the pressures of outside evaluation. The figures of the sponge and wax convey Richardson’s view of the porosity and the malleability of the self, its vulnerability to the stains and the weight of the actions of others. The body absorbs and receives, against its will, the imprint of others’ views and deeds. Such porosity complicates the evaluation of self and derails the mechanism of volition. As Clarissa writes to Anna Howe a few weeks after the forced elopement with Lovelace, ‘I am, in my own opinion, a poor lost creature: and yet cannot charge myself with one criminal or faulty inclination. Do you know, my dear, how this can be?’ (565). Clarissa’s attempts to remain aloof from Lovelace have been regarded as regressive, as signalling an inability to move into the adult, sexual world.25 Indeed, ousted from Harlowe Place (to which Clarissa attaches herself largely by virtue of a nostalgic yearning for a family ideal that has never existed), and convinced that she has nothing to hope for from her violent suitor, Clarissa is caught in a vacuous world in which neither the moorings of memory nor those of hope truly orient her (hence, largely, the pain she experiences when Anna criticizes her family).26 Clarissa’s attempts to retain her hold on a ‘possessed’ or unilateral self under such alienating circumstances are particularly heroic, and the effort required to remain ‘contained’ and in control of the self’s boundaries prodigious, as Clarissa’s majestic resistances and dangerous collapses suggest. Lovelace’s incur-

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sions against her are confusing and contaminatory: absorbing the false roles Lovelace imposes on her,27 suffering his physical advances, she comes to hate herself for Lovelace’s insults against her. (‘What has my conduct been,’ she cries to Lovelace, ‘that an insult of such a nature should be offered to me, as it would be a weakness to forgive? I am sunk in my own eyes!’ [835].) After the rape, this vague sense of guilt escalates to active self-blame (891), a sense of self-loss (894–5, 974, 1022), and self-hatred (890–1), states of incoherence that mend as Clarissa recovers herself in her preparations for death. A month before her demise, she writes to Anna Howe that she is ‘fatigued – with – I don’t know what – with writing, I think – but most with myself, and with a situation I cannot help aspiring to get out of, and above!’ (1194). By this time in the novel, however, Clarissa’s ‘self’ has been fundamentally redefined:28 detached from the contamination of the personal it has ascended into pure mind. ‘The injury I have received from [Lovelace] is indeed of the highest nature,’ she writes to Dr Lewen, ‘… yet, I bless God, it has not tainted my mind; it has not hurt my morals … My will is unviolated. The evil … is merely personal’ (1254). In the astounding clarity and deliberateness of her death, Clarissa recovers that ‘presence of mind’ (1277) which was absent at the garden gate, an ‘efficacy and clearness’ (1278) that are the hallmarks of a self detached from the pressures and turbulence of the physical world. No longer ‘fixed’ by Lovelace’s voyeuristic gaze (whether he is miniaturizing her through keyholes or doorways or seeing through her garments and skin), Clarissa, from the bailiff’s episode on, attains a self-contained and, in Richetti’s words, an ‘iconlike stillness’ (‘Richardson’s Dramatic Art’ 304), a radical distance from the real world. (Thus, the view of Clarissa in Mrs Smith’s window, which the lady against the way corruptly reports, is not simply misconstrued, but absolutely wrong.)29 It is precisely this clarity, this singleness of purpose, this uninterrupted peace (sounded in her beautiful name and in the images of light with which she is repeatedly connected) that have underwritten Clarissa’s early desires for the ‘single life’ (83, 172, 277, 280–1), for a remote and protected ‘nunnery’ (83) or sisterhood, a wish that she and Anna voice throughout the novel. ‘Upon my word,’ Anna complains to Clarissa, in one of the novel’s most misogamistic passages, I most heartily despise [the male] sex! I wish they would let our fathers and mothers alone; teasing them to tease us with their golden promises, and protestations, and settlements, and the rest of their ostentatious nonsense. How charmingly might you and I live together and despite them all! – But to be cajoled, wire-drawn, and ensnared, like silly birds, into a state of bondage or vile subordination: to be courted as princesses for a few weeks, in order to be treated as slaves for the rest of our lives – Indeed, my dear, as you say of Solmes, I cannot endure them! (133)

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This sentiment (reiterated throughout the novel) is not so much Sapphism (see Dussinger, Discourse 99; Ogden) as ‘separatism’ (Eagleton 78), a desire for purity issuing from sameness rather than difference, that clarifies and emancipates rather than suborns. Such independence is not possible for a number of reasons. One is that for an aspiring family of the middle class, a female who chooses to remain single is not an asset in the ‘fleshmarket,’30 in that moral and marital ‘Exchange & Mart’ that provided an opportunity for family advancement. And because children (especially female children) are subject to the desires of their parents (the proper exercise of which is an explicit subject of Richardson’s novel),31 they are particularly apt to become commoditized in the search for fiscal and political betterment that is the driving force of the nouveau riche. Clarissa’s ‘independence’ by virtue of her grandfather’s ‘will’ (78) – both terms are fraught with meaning in this novel32 – is precisely what puts her at risk in the Harlowe household. Forced to see themselves largely, in James’s coarse words, as ‘chickens brought up for the tables of other men’ (77), women run a fateful gauntlet between tyrant fathers and voracious lovers. Demeaningly courted for a few weeks only to be enslaved for the rest of their lives (133), their desires and sensibilities disregarded or overruled (1152), women must anticipate disenfranchisement on a psychological as well as a political level.33 The insults to a woman’s integrity in marriage are nearly guaranteed, because men, in Richardson’s view, are so despicable. (The outspoken Anna calls them ‘monkeys … baboons’ [210].) For a woman of any spirit, the marriage state is indistinguishable from that of war.34 ‘I love opposition,’ Lovelace writes in an early letter to Belford (519). Throughout his relationship with Clarissa, Lovelace celebrates qualities of relationships and the self that are precisely the opposite of those valued by Clarissa. Opposition and resistance, bodily contact and collisions, snatchings and violations are Lovelace’s characteristic actions. He is an interrupter (370), a trespasser (728), an encroacher, a man not of contemplation or meditation, but of bombast and violence (217). His preference for speed – the frantic scene at the Smiths’ epitomizes the manic energy that Richardson associates with Lovelace’s unstable and theatrical self – contrasts markedly with Clarissa’s need for slowness and concentration, for thoughtful and deliberate preparation for action that makes her habitation of the physical world so uncomfortable. Lovelace ‘quadrates’ (419), triangulates (520), rambles, and excurses (420); his imagination is active, refractive, doubling, expanding, splitting, fracturing. Obliquity and wryness are his favoured postures, the body his most expressive agent. He has an immense relish for difficulty, which, because his nature is both cerebral and combative, spurs him to his greatest feats. Like Iago, and

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like Inchbald’s Miss Milner (who resembles Lovelace in striking ways), he is not interested unless circumstances pose risk; he is less concerned with sexual satisfaction than with using sexuality as a field in which to practice his intellectual prowess.35 Lovelace exists at the vortex of an immense surge of moral and physical energy. ‘There is a present likelihood,’ he writes enthusiastically to Belford, revolving the manifold possibilities for exercising his invention early in the Clarissa affair, ‘of room for glorious mischief’ (147). His disposition is primarily theatrical rather than ‘absorptive’;36 not only does he strike stagelike postures, melodramatically clenching his hand to his forehead and throwing himself at Clarissa’s feet in the woodhouse (170–1), or bowing self-consciously to Mrs Harlowe in church (173);37 but also, more profoundly, he acts constantly to an audience (be that audience Belford, the recipient of his letters, or the vaguer set of libertine friends who are responsible for compiling the ‘rakish annals’ in which Lovelace’s deeds will be described and assessed [846]). This theatricalization of the body (and the repeated references to the illicit dramas he concocts, at the garden gate, at Mrs Sinclair’s, at Mrs Moore’s) is as disquieting as Crusoe’s play-acting in his island domain, hinting at a diffusion and sejunction of the self achieved by the body at the expense of something deeper and more true. (It is also a reminder of the novel’s generic claim on inwardness as opposed to the theatre’s emphasis on spectacle.) Lovelace’s histrionic self-presentation is evidence that intimacy is not a state that he either desires or will ever achieve. If no one is present, he acts to himself – that is, to a projection of himself that is as false as acting itself. (Such a refractive self-image is figured paradigmatically in the pier-glass passage, in which Clarissa, her back towards Lovelace, views in the glass her theatrical lover raising his clenched fist to his forehead. This moment is discussed in a chain of letters by Clarissa, Anna Howe, and Lovelace, 600–39.) His favourite situation, like Iago’s, is one in which he can experiment – perilously – with the interplay among more than two characters (as, for example, in the interesting scene in which he coaches Tomlinson from behind Clarissa’s back at Mrs Sinclair’s [832–6]). Thus it is in keeping that Lovelace perpetrate his rape of Clarissa before an audience of fallen, voracious women, antitypes of his inviolable victim, that the act of rape is thereby in his view deliriously doubled, those upon (and for) whom it is performed tauntingly multiplied. That Clarissa makes her final escape from Dover Street around the time that Lovelace is trotting out old stories of his libertinism to amuse his dying uncle Lord M shows how implicated Lovelace is in this Nessus shirt of his rakish self-image. This kinetic view of the self, this need for other not for ‘relationship’ but to ratify an unstable self that has been effectively overtaken by parade, guarantees that intimacy will never occur; indeed, Lovelace’s opposite view of the body as wax

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suggests that any obverse action (susceptibility, relaxation) will result in an obliteration of boundaries that poses a fundamental threat to his ego. To ‘melt,’ as he on two important and passionate occasions threatens to do, is to soften, to receive the impress of another person (in this case, Clarissa), an act that radically relocates the boundaries of the self within the circumference of another: ‘Darkness, light; Light, darkness; by my Soul!’ Lovelace cries to Clarissa in a passage added in the third edition. ‘– Just as you please to have it. O Charmer of my heart! snatching my hand, and pressing it between both his, to his lips, in a strange wild way, Take me, take me to yourself: Mould me as you please: I am wax in your hands: Give me your own impression; and seal me for ever yours – We were born for each other! – You to make me happy, and save a soul – I am all error, all crime’ (III, 139). Lovelace’s longing for rest (for ‘sealing’) gains a near liturgical status here; he envisions a frantic surrender that will efface all difference of will and body. The ‘rakish annals,’ however, do not record such tales. Lovelace prefers staler patterns of take-over and duplication rather than absorption. (The charming picture of the twin Lovelaces at Clarissa’s breasts [706] is evidence of such hubristic desire for self-replication.)38 If Lovelace holds himself aloof from the contamination of intimacy by an exaggerated insistence on his own self-importance, and exerts power over others by forcing them to play roles in dramas meant primarily to elevate him, Clarissa desires an intimacy that does not impeach the self. These views are alike in their guardedness and suspicion about states of ‘mutual obligation’ (760). Anna Howe offers early in the novel a view of marriage as a circumstance in which ideally the boundaries between husband and wife are clearly demarcated: The suiting of the tempers of two persons who are to come together is a great matter: and yet there should be boundaries fixed between them, by consent as it were, beyond which neither should go: and each should hold the other to it; or there would probably be encroachments in both. If the boundaries of the three estates that constitute our political union were not known, and occasionally asserted, what would become of each? The two branches of the legislature would encroach upon each other; and the executive power would swallow up both. (277)

But as Lovelace argues (sophistically) to Belford, humans exist in a perpetual situation of mutual bondage: Clarissa, he claims, never was in a state of independency; nor is it fit a woman should, of any age, or in any state of life. And as to the state of obligation, there is no such thing as living without being beholden to somebody. Mutual obligation is the very essence and

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As Lovelace’s cunning twists of terminology here suggest, any notion of human independency is effectively illusory; we are born into a state of war, from which we can twist free only through acts of supererogatory mastery. Lovelace thus views marriage with Clarissa as an opportunity not for love (because as an egoist he finds mutuality cloying and demeaning) but for superiority and subjugation: I would have the woman whom I honour with my name, if ever I confer this honour upon any, forgo even her superior duties for me. I would have her look after me when I go out, as far as she can see me, as my Rosebud after her Johnny; and meet me at my return with rapture. I would be the subject of her dreams, as well as of her waking thoughts. I would have her look upon every moment lost, that is not passed with me: sing to me, read to me, play to me when I pleased; no joy so great as in obeying me. When I should be inclined to love, overwhelm me with it; when to be serious or solitary, if intrusive, awfully so; retiring at a nod; approaching me only if I smiled encouragement: steal into my presence with silence; out of it, if not noticed, on tiptoe. Be a Lady Easy to all my pleasures, and valuing those most, who most contributed to them; only sighing in private, that it was not herself at the time – Thus of old did the contending wives of the honest patriarchs; each recommending her handmaid to her lord, as she thought it would oblige him, and looking upon the genial product as her own. (669–70)

Lovelace here simply exchanges one species of deference for another: imperilled by the intimacy of love, he pays homage to its opposite in the blatant theatricality and tyranny of the rake’s creed. Clarissa’s recourse, damaged by the encroachments of one who desires the annihilation of love itself (1422), is the opposite: an ejection out of the whole worldly system of self and other into a register in which the hierarchical categories of domination and submission are skewed into ambiguity and paradox. Thus, Clarissa’s ‘rescue’ of the self occurs in its loss, in its relinquishment of power to divine control. Remote from the Hobbesian world of factious power interests, submission of the will, which Lovelace views as a precondition of his mastery of Clarissa, becomes, in the new Christian system, redemptive and purifying. Clarissa, ‘no slave in [her] will,’ as she declares triumphantly to Lovelace (930), in her dying exultantly relinquishes her will to that of God (‘Lord, it is thy will; and it shall be mine’

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[1118]). The erotic imagery of the heterosexual relationship shifts to death. ‘DEATH,’ as Lovelace shouts to Hickman in one of the novel’s most memorable scenes, causing that good mild-mannered man to ‘jump half a yard high’ (1097), is her lover, ‘better … than … an earthly husband’ (1121); indeed, ‘God will have no rivals in the hearts of those he sanctifies’ (1338). Clarissa becomes ‘the bride of Christ’ (1339) and prepares confidently for her marriage with a heavenly bridegroom. Clarissa’s integrity, thus, the inviolateness of her self, has been achieved only through a departure from a social and earthly sphere. Richardson’s deep anxiety about the permeability of the self, its susceptibility to the physical and emotional incursions of others, strictly precludes any notion of socialization. Clarissa lives her short life in futile search of an ideal family that she has long since lost, and she dies in deliberate disengagement from patriarchal and class society, the surrogate family that surrounds her in death underscoring the betrayal of her earthly parents. ‘Her [death] is in a profound sense a political gesture, a shocking, surreal act of resignation from a society whose power system she has seen … for what it is’ (Eagleton 74). Despite his connections with his gang of libertine friends, Lovelace is as – perhaps even more – profoundly ‘asocialized’ as Clarissa (but for an opposite reason). The rakish brotherhood is in the end truly only ‘bottle-deep’ (1100): as de la Tour will later hasten to disengage himself from Lovelace, the rakes desert the dying Belton impatiently and without qualm. Such a world of predation and lovelessness ‘proves,’ as Jocelyn Harris has remarked, and as Inchbald will later explore, ‘the need for a social contract’ (332).39 Yet as those contractual obligations thicken, the individual becomes entangled and bereft of power. It is for such stakes that Richardson’s search for freedom is played. If the self must beware in the relative privacy of an intimate relationship of trespasses against its integrity, that self in a social setting is threatened in more complex and equally impugning ways. The only retreat in which one may find refuge is not, it seems, in retirement (as Clarissa learns to her cost when Betty Barnes invades her private drawers, and when Lovelace hounds her from one false haven to another) but in a kind of paralysis, an enervated state in which the self is relieved from the need to act. In this state of bodily disengagement, in which freedom of choice has been definitively compromised and curtailed, ‘action’ is in effect no longer possible and the self approaches (paradoxically) a state of freedom in which ‘real’ circumstances have no impact and no bearing. The quintessence of this state, horribly, is Clarissa, ‘dead’ (1413), opiated at the moment of the rape, the one moment of the novel in which her will is unequivocally disengaged, the moment at which she is ‘most’ innocent.40 Certainly, the pressures of punctilio are sometimes liberating: Clarissa’s

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awareness of propriety (and its violations) result in some of the more expressive and electric exchanges in Richardson’s novel. In the early stages of her tragedy Clarissa navigates through social decorums and domestic rivalry with interesting grace. The pressure of familial (and monetary) interests, however, rapidly escalates to a height that becomes oppressive. Engagement in a world marked by power relations, in which correspondence involves one in an exchange of political ‘advantage[s]’ (51), is inevitably tainting: Clarissa’s toleration of Lovelace’s addresses, which she feels is necessary in order to forestall violence between him and her brother (51), is snatched up and wilfully misinterpreted by her sister as ‘preference’ for James’s would-be assassin. Under such circumstances, relationships, far from being ‘intimate,’ become entanglements (84; such imagery pervades the novel) in a vast net of familial and social intercourse, and actions to forestall or encourage alliances easily backfire. As Anna notes to Clarissa, the Harlowes, by fighting Lovelace off, bring him closer to her (70–1). Indeed, as the pressure to marry Solmes mounts, Clarissa reverts increasingly to Lovelace as a means of creating any alternative (at all) in the tyrannical conversations designed to persuade her to the family’s will. Such a gambit for enfranchisement will congeal, rapidly, into its opposite, positioning Clarissa, as she vividly complains, between two equally destructive options, upon one of which she must inevitably be driven. Richardson’s view of the family as a whirlpool of power mongers broadens the Hobbesian notion of the predatory self: James magnifies the perquisites of his status in the family to seize more than his share of power from his father, eroding the range of the senior Harlowe’s authority so that he can thunder out the awful curse that, proleptically, guarantees Clarissa’s suffering but not offer her (like Milton’s God) the possibility for repair; Bella, disappointed in her marital views and envious of Clarissa’s charm, goads her family to disempower her sister; Mrs Harlowe attempts to buy family peace with the tainted currency of a prostituted will. To exercise obedience in such an arena, in which merely to move is to risk springing a mine, is deeply to compromise the self – not only because rightful authority is no longer being exercised, but also because the Harlowes’ motives for exacting obedience are so unsound. James’s chief concern is his ascension to a peerage (through the acquisition of as much money and land as possible); he and his sister, motivated additionally by personal rancour against Lovelace, are willing – even eager – to sacrifice Clarissa to achieve such an end. Indeed, Lovelace’s rape of Clarissa at Mrs Sinclair’s is merely the bodily culmination of a process of subjugation that has begun at Harlowe Place, with the family’s demands that she relinquish her will to theirs. ‘Surrender your … will,’ James Harlowe writes to his sister (223). ‘The heart, Clary,’ her mother tells her, using a metaphor that Lovelace, characteristically, later literalizes, ‘is

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what I want’ (103). Scenes of forceful interruption and union – Bella putting her handkerchief before Clarissa’s mouth (228), James arrogantly offering Clarissa’s hand to Solmes (306) (which Clarissa sees as a frantic foreplay of the wedding scene, imagining her relations forcing her hand into Solmes’s and holding it there ‘till the service be read; I perhaps insensible, and in fits, all the time’ [322]) – show James and Arabella to be panders, like Mrs Sinclair and her infernal daughters, using Solmes as the (sexual) instrument of their vile revenge. Lovelace’s transportation of this model of domination to Mrs Sinclair’s underscores how his violation of Clarissa has its roots in the tyranny of the family: he merely gives it a more sexual ‘edge.’ (Thus, Belford’s taunts that he is a mere ‘instrument’ [604] of the family.) Mrs Harlowe’s desire to appropriate Clarissa’s voice (‘Will you not, can you not, speak as I would have you speak?’ [107]) proves the link between tyranny and the unstable will, and knots the matrix of ‘interdicts’ (65) the Harlowes use to try to entrap and devalue their daughter, whose clarity of will they envy and seek to suborn. Clarissa is embarrassed and disturbed by such shoddy ventriloquism, which she rejects disdainfully as a species of enslavement. ‘My mind is not that of a slave,’ she tells Anna Howe (111). As negotiation within such a complex structure of egos becomes increasingly impossible, Clarissa experiences the erosion of choice that will inevitably equate the exercise of free will with tragedy. As she writes in despair to Anna Howe, Only one thing must be allowed for me; that whatever course I shall be permitted or be forced to steer, I must be considered as a person out of her own direction. Tossed to and fro by the high winds of passionate control, and, as I think, unreasonable severity, I behold the desired port, the single state, which I would fain steer into; but am kept off by the foaming billows of a brother’s and sister’s envy; and by the raging winds of a supposed invaded authority; while I see in Lovelace, the rocks on one hand, and in Solmes, the sands on the other, and tremble lest I should split upon the former, or strike upon the latter. (280–1)

In a situation of such turbulence, it becomes increasingly difficult to define action, or to unite will and event in action. How am I driven [Clarissa writes to Anna Howe the day after the interview with Solmes] to and fro, like a feather in the wind, at the pleasure of the rash, the selfish and the headstrong! and when I am as averse to the proceedings of the one as I am to those of the other! But being forced into a clandestine correspondence, indiscreet measures are fallen upon by the rash man before I can be consulted:

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Richardson’s fretful alteration of passages bearing on Clarissa’s role in the clandestine correspondence and the elopement (see Van Marter 120–3) suggests not only his anxiety about Clarissa’s complicity in the departure from Harlowe Place, but also a deeper disquietude about the relationship between action (‘steps taken’) and volition, and how (and if) one may ‘act’ without choice. Indeed, in a state of tyranny or unlawful authority, scornful renunciation, ‘unshakenness,’ may be the only feasible form of action. Clarissa’s refusal to surrender her will, however, implicitly challenges, as it does later with Lovelace, those whose selves play pander to others (or images of others) more powerful than they. Assertion of self under such a rubric necessarily becomes combative: Clarissa, in her opposition to her family’s demands, is drawn reluctantly into the tactical tos and fros of the Harloweian battlefield. As she asserts herself (through her unwillingness to act in accordance with her family’s desires),41 the range of her power tragically, as Donald Wehrs has pointed out, narrows (769).42 Indeed, she enters that paradoxical realm (a kind of demagnetized field) of action in which not doing, refusing, is the only way in which the energy of her will can be expended.43 Such expenditures are far from passive: ‘How strong is will!’ her brother James exclaims as Clarissa breaks from him after a trying scene with Solmes. ‘– There is no holding her’ (324). Devoid, however, of an arena in which such energy can be shaped into positive action, the effect of its force is ultimately depleting and exhausting. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is death, as Clarissa’s shocking references to live burial and her frightful dream reveal. Clarissa’s fantasies of escaping to Leghorn to meet her cousin Morden (231) or of living independently in London (‘If I could get safely thither, and be private, methinks I might remain absolutely independent of Mr Lovelace and at liberty’ [334]) are as specious as Lovelace’s ‘alternatives and proposals’ (348), his promises to restore Clarissa to liberty and to her own free will (349). Indeed, Clarissa’s personal power, constricted at Harlowe Place, undergoes increasing diminishment by Lovelace as he encroaches with more and more vehemence upon her rights. As with the Scylla and Charybdis choice of Solmes and Lovelace (238), the narrowness of Clarissa’s options shows that choice alone does not necessarily entail the exercise of free will. In any event, as Leopold Damrosch has argued, Clarissa desires not freedom so much as a rightful God to whom to pay obedience (236), in part because her idea of freedom is sophisticated enough not to be confused with release from servitude. But

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Richardson’s Eden has fallen long ago; the God who adjudicates and foresees all has shrunk to a Kurtzian wraith with only a voice that utters the paternal curse. In this Eden of division and death,44 Clarissa as Eve is hurried from her father’s garden accompanied by Satan, not Adam: the Miltonic echoes create a cacophonous parody of a world in which free will has been abrogated by the very father meant to protect it.45 Denied a choice at the garden gate, Clarissa cannot be said properly to act. As Richardson shows in the masterful account of that moment by Clarissa, she is ‘tricked out of herself’; deprived of the serenity she needs to reflect on her situation, she runs yet knew not that I ran; my fears at the same time that they took all power of thinking from me adding wings to my feet: my fears, which probably would not have suffered me to know what course to take, had I not had him to urge and draw me after him … my voice, however, contradicting my action; crying, No, no, no, all the while, straining my neck to look back as long as the walls of the garden and park were within sight. (380)46

Clarissa here not only falls reluctantly (more like Adam than like Eve), but is also ejected from the garden at the same moment, without the succour of the redemptive promise. It is as if that part of Paradise Lost has collapsed inwards, proving the injustice of the Harloweian universe. (Indeed, in the time-lapse fashion characteristic of Richardson’s imagistic treatment of the Harlowes’ Eden, Solmes has already been offered as a sordid Christ, as Clarissa’s saviour or redeemer [‘You shall be redeemed,’ James taunts his ‘fallen’ sister, ‘… this worthy gentleman … will … redeem you from ruin – and hereafter you will bless him’ (306)].) The overtones of violation at this moment are strident: the ‘violent pushes’ (379) and ruptures, the pistols, guns, and naked swords, tremblings and bursts are displaced backwards from the rape at Sinclair’s, underscoring not only the archetypal nature of this moment (such violations recur throughout the narrative) but also the fluidity of imagistic systems that are stirred up at this crucial juncture in the work. When Clarissa later selects this moment as the time of her death, effectively erasing the events that transpire afterward, it seems critical to ask what, in fact, she feels has happened at the garden gate. Clarissa’s departure from Harlowe Place is, certainly, irretrievably damaging to her reputation (‘the eye of the world’ [355]) (though the censure Clarissa fears is dramatized almost exclusively by her family; indeed, the little we hear about society’s outrage at the act is rightfully directed against the Harlowes, and Anna Howe and others maintain nearly to the end of the novel that marriage with Lovelace will ‘repair’ this breach of decorum). In a legal

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sense, the elopement incriminates Clarissa: she has (apparently willingly) gone off with her seducer, and henceforth goes by his name. Yet, as with the social sanctions of the novel, such a judgment is not only limited but also drastically flawed. The legal system is shown to be fundamentally corrupt: Lovelace exults to Belford, ‘What an admirable lawyer should I have made!’ (1287), and his fantasy of the courtroom scene, in which he is arraigned for the rape of Mrs Howe and her daughter and ‘a dozen or two of young maidens, all dressed in white,’ beg his pardon (IV, 260), bears out this claim. Neither the theoreticians nor the practitioners of eighteenth-century law are able to disengage in any subtle way action and intention,47 and Clarissa eventually pursues justice in another court. Forced to judge this passage for himself, the reader experiences fewer difficulties. His awareness of Lovelace’s contrivances clarifies Clarissa’s role as victim of an ingenious and remarkably stagy plot: it is not the men of the family she hears approaching, but the behind-scenes helper, Joseph Leman. The immediate cause of her flight is trumped up, a fake, a Lovelacean tour de force. Lovelace attempts to draw Clarissa from the garden by argument, by physical strength (‘he was again drawing me after him’ [376]), by threats to her family, and finally by art. That it is the last device that moves her proves the baseness of Lovelace’s project: in contrast to Clarissa’s high-minded attempts to align her behaviour with absolute standards of right and wrong, no ruse is too low for Lovelace, for whom both moral and aesthetic codes have been replaced by a merely functional notion of sexual-political success and failure. Though Clarissa’s frightened vision at the moment of her elopement – a surreal composite of vengeful familial faces (anticipated), Lovelace’s drawn sword (fact), other drawn swords (apprehended) – updates the flaming brands at Eden’s gate at the moment of Adam and Eve’s departure and seals her step into the world of experience (the phallic sword, the furious father), Richardson makes clear that this is not a moment that promises hope or redemption on any level. The flitting figure of Joseph Leman (‘running backward and forward’ [380]) and Clarissa’s terror certify imagistically that this is another rape, that terror and confusion, not desire give her feet wings.48 Judging herself by her own stringent internal code (‘my blame,’ she tells Anna Howe, ‘was indeed turned inward’ [391]), Clarissa reproaches herself for her indiscretion and her presumption in meeting Lovelace at the gate, indeed in carrying on the prohibited correspondence that led to the assignation in the first place. ‘How much more properly had I acted,’ she writes to Anna, with regard to that correspondence, had I once for all when he was forbid to visit me, and I to receive his visits, pleaded the authority I ought to have been bound by,

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and denied to write to him! – But I thought I could proceed or stop as I pleased. I supposed it concerned me more than any other to be the arbitress of the quarrels of unruly spirits – and now I find my presumption punished! – punished, as other sins frequently are, by itself! (381)

In such a self-charge, we see not only Richardson’s fearful conceit that the body, machine-like, can build up its own momentum (as with Lovelace’s frantic actions in the scene at Smith’s), bypassing in the frenzy of the moment the will, but also again the difficulties for the self to act ‘properly’ in a world in which propriety and authority have become vitiated concepts: Clarissa seizes autonomy at Harlowe Place in part because not to do so would be to cede to a corrupted notion of discipline, and she interprets that act as one of almost primal disobedience. The issue of will (as with the rape) interestingly does not enter into Clarissa’s self-arraignment (though it has marked many critical discussions of the moment). Indeed, the act itself seems to get folded in between what Clarissa calls her ‘busy prescience’ (381) (her solicitousness over her family, her presumptuous attempt to adjudicate between them and Lovelace) and the tragic consequences of her action. Lovelace seizes upon Clarissa at a moment of division, of confusion and self-estrangement, a moment at which the body, lacking the higher guidance of the mind, may do things the mind does not wish it to do. Anna’s first reaction to her friend’s ‘fall’ assumes a congruence between the will and the act, a connection between desire and deed, that Clarissa’s family will elaborate on more crudely: ‘Yet how you came to change your mind is the surprising thing!’ (371). (Clarissa has baldly, self-punitively conveyed the same assumption in her announcement to Anna of her departure: ‘your Clarissa Harlowe is gone off with a man!’ [370].) Yet in situations of such entanglement and momentum, it is nearly impossible to isolate wilful or deliberate action. Throughout Richardson’s novel, a desire can resonate and proliferate, cancerlike, into action (as Lovelace’s ‘general orders’ [1051] result in and raise the question of his culpability for the specific event of Clarissa’s arrest) or it can peculiarly deaden into hard opacity. As Clarissa’s Aunt Hervey exclaims to her niece after the elopement, discouraging her extenuation of her ‘fault,’ ‘What can you clear up? Are you not gone off? – with a Lovelace too?’ (503). As Anna later advises Clarissa, ‘Don’t be so angry at yourself. Did you not do for the best at the time? As to your first fault, the answering his letters; it was almost incumbent upon you to assume the guardianship of such a family, when the bravo of it had run riot, as he did, and brought himself into danger’ (403); ‘Your provocations and inducements considered, you are free from blame … You were driven on one side, and possibly tricked on the other’ (405). The pal-

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liatives in Anna’s letter (‘at the time,’ ‘almost,’ ‘considered’) certify that Clarissa, whatever the garden gate demarcates, is now tragically at large in a world governed by conditionals, a world that is morally at odds with her absolute notions of right and wrong.49 Clarissa’s moral grandeur (and her tragedy) is that (like Tess) she insists upon judging herself for an action in which voluntary commission is not the sole basis for blame. It is not simply that she ‘absorbs’ the negative judgment of herself that must, she reasons, have led to Lovelace’s trying her (here, her egoism resembles Lovelace’s); in a game of strategies, in which giving Lovelace rein may forestall a family tragedy, the will becomes so attenuated over a range of focal points that it may become paralysed at the moment it is called upon to act. Clarissa’s power is reflective and absorptive, and these are the energies that both define and imperil her self. ‘Tricked out of herself’ into a wider and more dynamic field, she loses the autonomy that is the precondition for freedom. Thus Richardson’s emphasis on the roles and disguises foisted upon Clarissa after her departure from her father’s house. Lovelace stains her by forcing her (wittingly and unwittingly) to move in a world of masquerade: Clarissa’s celebrated options under this rubric are fiendish parodies of the freedom she has lost. (‘Who could forbear smiling,’ Lovelace brags to Belford, describing Clarissa’s choice of a lodging place in London, ‘to see my charmer, like a farcical dean and chapter, choose what was before chosen for her?’ [472].) Such a reduction of everything to farce, however, is a cheap form of liberty and one that will eventually lash back on Lovelace, who gains his supposed enfranchisement and inflates his ego by believing in nothing. (‘All we do, all we wish for, is a jest,’ he writes to Joseph Leman [495].) Hence arises Lovelace’s obsessive need to ‘test’ Clarissa’s virtue (which is her freedom), to break her self-command. Clarissa’s moral absorptiveness defies Lovelace’s self-serving judgment that the world is a joke and simultaneously (the conjunction guarantees Clarissa’s tragedy) affords him a glimpse of the redemption he knows he needs. Thus, Lovelace’s gestures of love are necessarily acts of punishment. In his moments of enlightenment (which, unlike Clarissa’s, are moments of self-abandon) Lovelace voices a vehement desire for a forcible takeover, a ravishment of the will mixed with self-recrimination and anger at the tacit dismissal of him embodied by Clarissa’s virtue and integrity: ‘By my soul, I cannot forgive her for her virtues! – There is no bearing the consciousness of the infinite inferiority she charged me with – But why will she break from me, when good resolutions are taking place? – The red-hot iron she refuses to strike – Oh why will she suffer the yielding wax to harden?’ (853). Richardson makes clear in his Prefatical Hints to Clarissa that a man must

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not seek redemption through a woman (Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript 3). Commerce with God is a solitary affair, and Lovelace’s frenetic activity, his idea of life as spectacle, flies in the face of the more ‘absorptive’ view that Richardson feels is necessary for self-extenuation and salvation. After the rape, Clarissa regains presence of mind through a process of withdrawal and retraction (away from Lovelace and, more deeply, into the self that has always been her place of peace). Her period of self-hatred and selfestrangement after Lovelace’s violation is her purgatory. Descending deeply into the self, she learns to eradicate the personal will that is the last vestige of pride (of presumption) so that she can relinquish herself to a greater will (that of God). Desire (figured forth erotically at the moment of her death, in the invocations to Christ and the references to him as her bridegroom) is innocent now, as if the fall has been rewound somehow, the state of innocence radicalized (to use Yeats’s term) and made so intimate that earthly life has become a fume. The process, as for many Christian saints, is a disembarrassment of earthly and psychological trappings that, paradoxically, confers greatest power at the same time that it extinguishes it. It is the will, the worm preying upon the blossom, as John Climacus put it, ‘deep down in [the] heart, like a snake in dung’ (183), that must be vanquished, that must be absorbed into that of God. This is the kind of ultimate chastity and aloneness that Richardson wants. Only under such circumstances can one achieve the freedom Clarissa demonstrates in the deliberateness and grace of her last moments.50 What are the possibilities for human intimacy under such a world view? The family is shown by Richardson to be a mass of conflicting power interests; Clarissa’s attempts to achieve a definition of herself within such a structure tragically renders void those sobriquets of ‘mother,’ ‘sister,’ and ‘father’ that ideally fortify and locate the self in a broader sphere of intimacy. (Hence, the destabilization of the word ‘father’ in the novel, and, perhaps, Richardson’s stiffening of forms of paternal and maternal address in the second edition of the work.) The marriage state is simply a more pronounced (because more finely focused) battlefield, a weltering terrain of unfairly disposed power, in which the woman’s sense is demeaned to the baboon-like prerogatives of the male. Clarissa’s return to ‘her father’s house’ at the novel’s end suggests that Richardson’s heroine is finally operating with a dictionary whose definitions are no longer earthly ones, though they tragically echo with an earthly resonance, that true intimacy – certainly not to be achieved through a union of bodies, or on the world’s stage, if Clarissa’s fate is any indication – must be achieved privately, incommunicably, within the self. Clarissa’s ‘story,’ as Anna Howe laments in her moving reunion with her dead friend, like Hamlet’s, can never be fully told: the absorption of Clarissa’s voice into the language of scripture51 suggests

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a disembodiment, indeed a disappearance of the ‘self’ that is in a fundamental way irrecoverable. As Clarissa’s voice is muted and deadened into the legal documents that close the novel, and lost entirely in the anxiety about ‘accounting’ that pervades the final pages, we realize that there is no refuge from the graspings of the sensual world, from the riflings of the world’s Dorcases and Lovelaces, except in silence, in the untouchedness of retreat. In this most dramatic of novels, Richardson thus calls into doubt the efficacy and integrity of human action itself.

4 Tom Jones: Cohesion

I will venture to add, that the moral tendency of Fielding’s writings, though it does not encourage a strained and rarely possible virtue, is ever favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous affections. He who is as good as Fielding would make him, is an amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated instructors, to a higher state of ethical perfection. James Boswell (1768) If my design had been to propagate virtue by appearing publickly in its defence, I should rather have been ye Author of Tom Jones than of five Folio Volumes of sermons. Captain Lewis Thomas, letter to Welbore Ellis, 3 April 1749

Near the end of Tom Jones, charged by Sophia to explain his entanglement with Lady Bellaston during a period in which he professed to be solely devoted to his ‘divine Angel’ (974), Tom insists on his loyalty to her: ‘By all that is sacred,’ he cries, ‘[your Image] never was out of my Heart. The Delicacy of your Sex cannot conceive the Grossness of ours, nor how little one Sort of Amour has to do with the Heart’ (973). Against this temporizing, Sophia posits, prettily, a view of love as a concurrent effort of body and spirit, of sensual desire and the passion of the heart: ‘I will never marry a Man,’ she replies, ‘who shall not learn Refinement enough to be as incapable as I am myself of making such a Distinction’ (973). In this pronouncement of love as simultaneously sensual and soulful (a ‘Desire [of the] Sense’ as well as a ‘Passion [of the] Heart’ [973]), Sophia is made to give voice to one of the most important tenets of Fielding’s Tom Jones, a novel that deals, preeminently, with ‘the Passion of Love’ (268).1 Fielding’s

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focus in this great novel repairs on many levels the dissension that marks the writers that precede him, not only in his frank celebration of the body but also in his confident conviction that man should – and can – enact his spiritual duties in the social realm. To the template posited by Swift and Richardson, in which corporeal and spiritual seem actively to erode each other’s efficacy, Fielding offers, in the broader scope of his focus and in the adoption of a more vitalistic stance (focusing on action as opposed to meditation), an opportunity for a more forgiving – and hence comic – position on the human condition. God’s promise of good will to men that repairs the Fall will come about, in Fielding’s view, in the dedication of the human community to love. In chapter i of Book VI, which opens the novel into a fuller treatment of the mutual attraction of Tom and Sophia, the narrator presents Fielding’s philosophy of love, alluding to its sacred qualities (268–9) and underscoring the vital connections among love, ‘Virtue,’ and ‘Goodness’ (268). In his elaboration on this passion, he makes a distinction between a love that is exclusively sensual and one that combines and refines the delights of the body with satisfactions of a more philanthropic kind. With physical love (or Eros), love of the body, Fielding associates excess and appetite, ‘the Desire of satisfying a voracious Appetite with a certain Quantity of delicate white human Flesh’ (270). This is the love of the lower regions, as applicable to the table as to the bedroom (fields of metaphor that will collapse in Mrs Waters’s seduction of hungry Tom at the table at Upton). Such love, as Fielding argues, is ‘more properly Hunger’ (270) and may be applied with equal propriety to food and to humans. At its most extreme, it suggests an equation between love and ‘a Dish of Soup, or a Sir-loin of Roast-beef’ (272).2 This is the animal instinct that draws Tom into the thicket with Molly Seagrim, ‘an Appetite,’ in the words of Allworthy, as he admonishes the innocent Jenny Jones, ‘[that man has] in common with the vilest Branch of the Creation’ (52), a ‘trivial [and] contemptible’ (53) passion that demotes man to the level of the ‘lowest Animal’ (52). Against this view of love as carnal, appetitive, Fielding advocates a more delicate, though equally vigorous passion, an affection founded on the desire to give happiness to another – as in friendship, parental or filial affection, gratitude, and esteem, as also in general philanthropy – that may subsist without physical passion and that may also be ‘heightened and sweetened’ (270) and enriched by its intervention. Fielding here makes a clear distinction (even as he propounds their relationship) between ‘Desire’ and ‘Love,’ suggesting, and indeed exemplifying in the youthful Tom, the association of physical passion with ‘Youth and Beauty’ and that of love with the more mature and elevated virtues of ‘Esteem and Gratitude’ (270). If, on ‘the ladder of love’ (to use J. Paul Hunter’s expression [Occasional Form 169]), we ascend from bodily

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desire to a purer love,3 ideally, in Fielding’s view, we do not so much leave sensual pleasures behind us as combine them in a wise and fruitful way with prerogatives of a broader, more social and ethical kind. The body is thus central to Fielding’s moral and passional universe in Tom Jones, its delights and its energies charting (as critics from the time of Samuel Johnson have argued) a course diametrically opposite to that of Richardson. Fielding’s eponymous hero is, of course, his author’s most vigorous emissary in the cause of love. Tom’s susceptibility to women (to Molly and to Mrs Waters) is part of his ‘Constitution’ (174), his ‘Complexion’ (194), and is connected in some vague way to his gentility, his warmth of temperament, and his high spirits. Though it is also evidence of his immaturity, an energy that Tom will eventually learn to moderate, Fielding seems eager to insist throughout that the doctrine of love to which Tom subscribes is based on generosity and goodness, not on vanity and conquest.4 Indeed, Tom is depicted occasionally as aspiring to a love so rarefied as to efface his needs altogether. ‘Believe me, Madam,’ he writes late in the novel to Sophia, ‘I so sincerely love you better than myself, that my great and principal End is your Happiness’ (844). That this fervent expression of self-abnegation has been delivered in a fowl and evokes no reply because Sophia has been deprived of ink and paper suggests Fielding’s view that such magnanimity in love borders on the ridiculous. Here is a selflessness that sounds like ethical vanity, that pleasurable ‘Tickling’ that Sophia feels in entertaining the possibility of relinquishing Tom to dedicate her life to her father (360). Such renunciation of self or body is far from Fielding’s plan in Tom Jones, nor indeed was it in Joseph Andrews, which celebrates the long-awaited consummation of Joseph and Fanny’s marriage in terms that explicitly and warmly exalt physical love: Joseph no sooner heard [Fanny] was in Bed, than he fled with the utmost Eagerness to her. A Minute carried him into her Arms, where we shall leave this happy Couple to enjoy the private Rewards of their Constancy; Rewards so great and sweet, that I apprehend Joseph neither envied the noblest Duke, nor Fanny the finest Duchess that Night. (343)5

In Boucé’s words, Fielding’s position – adumbrated in ‘An Essay on Conversation’ (pub. 1743), in which he names physical love ‘one of our highest and most serious Pleasures’ (Miscellanies 148) – is ‘much too subtle, humane and wise to … exclude carnal intercourse from his concept of love’ (‘Sex’ 33). Indeed, though liaisons of a strictly physical kind are eschewed in the end for a ‘higher’ love, Tom’s sexual energy, as well as that of Mrs Waters, is frankly approved for its source in a generosity that has to do with more than the sim-

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ple satisfaction of an ‘animal’ instinct (though Fielding would hope, I think, that such a desire to convey happiness to others is equally primal).6 As Taine declared, ‘Fielding, who has seen in man nature as opposed to rule, praises in man nature as opposed to rule; so that, according to him, virtue is but an instinct. Generosity in his eyes is, like all sources of action, a primitive inclination; like all sources of action, it flows on receiving no good from catechisms and phrases; like all sources of action, it flows at times too copious and quick. Take it as it is, and do not try to oppress it under a discipline, or to replace it by an argument’ (3: 297). John Middleton Murry’s contention – that Fielding believed ‘that there was a generosity of the body,’ that sexual appetite and good nature were connected – combines physical and spiritual love in a configuration that is distinctive to Fielding: ‘He believed that Christian love and human friendship and the love between man and woman were intimately allied by the tenderness they had in common … Tenderness, warmth, sympathy, gratitude, generosity were the true virtues … solicitude for others, no matter how disreputably arrayed, was to be loved’ (Unprofessional Essays 51). Fielding’s emphasis on physical beauty and energy throughout Tom Jones, his construction of a complex plot characterized by purposive action, and his cultivation of a comedic style that involves the repeated juxtaposition of concrete and abstract suggest the centrality of embodiment to Fielding’s moral and narrative art in this most masterful of his fictions. The problems of the body articulated by Defoe, Swift, and Richardson – its unseemly jostling with the work of the spirit or will, its crudity, its destructive effect on ideas, its suspicious penchant towards spectacle – are in Tom Jones temporarily resolved. An acceptance – even celebration – of the world as fallen and a generous and forgiving comic perspective reflect a fictive universe in which the body is central, its beauty is commended, and its alignment (in the case of Sophia) with a sphere of abstract moral values is repeatedly stressed. Though in the work of Inchbald, the body will exert damaging pressure on ideas of contract and mutuality (as it will later for Fielding in Amelia), Tom Jones calls an emphatic truce in the contention of body and spirit, body and mind, that is realized in the impetus of the novel, in the union of Tom and Sophia, and in the rich and urbane comedy of the work’s narrative voice. As a consequence of his focus on love and his predominantly social outlook, Fielding, like his rival Richardson, is deeply concerned with the political ramifications of love and of matrimony. As is the case with Clarissa, Tom Jones is a novel fundamentally concerned with marital decision making. Squire Western and his sister plot to marry Sophia off (alternately) to Blifil, then to Lord Fellamar, and finally to Tom. Mrs Fitzpatrick recklessly arouses the interest of the unscrupulous Mr Fitzpatrick at Bath, marrying him against the better judgment

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of her peers. The story of Mr Fitzpatrick’s treachery and the deterioration of their marriage, as well as Mrs Fitzpatrick’s indecorous liaison with the Irish nobleman, occupies much of Fielding’s attention at the midpoint of the novel. Lady Bellaston, having ‘try’d the Comforts [of Marriage] once already,’ has pledged herself to the single life (865). Fielding’s recurring portraits of marital misery and infidelity (Mrs Waters, Mr and Mrs Fitzpatrick, Squire Western and his late wife, Mr and Mrs Partridge, Bridget Allworthy and Captain Blifil, the Endersons, as well as assorted snappish secondary personages) caution his readers about the potential perils of the married state. Various subsidiary characters – the Quaker whom Tom meets on the road to Bristol, who attempts to force his daughter into wedlock with a man of his liking (363–4); Old Mr Nightingale, who intends to marry Nightingale off to the ugly Miss Harris because of her fortune; and Old Mr Nightingale’s brother, whose only daughter elopes with a neighbouring clergyman – reiterate the theme of parental tyranny in marriage. Mrs Miller recounts her own sentimental story of paternal disapproval and romantic love (757–8). The list of liaisons and marriages at the end (Blifil and the rich Methodist widow; Mrs Fitzpatrick and the Irish peer, Mrs Waters and Parson Supple, Partridge and Molly Seagrim) suggests not only that the conjugal state is the condition to which most lives eventually tend but also that it is a site of a sometimes wry form of poetic justice. Fielding, indeed, tracks the romantic careers of his characters with great assiduity – with particular attention to the competing concerns of the ‘Business’ of match-making and the desires of the heart, the satisfactions of marital fidelity (Allworthy, Mrs Miller), the strange freedoms of unmarried women (Lady Bellaston, Mrs Waters, Aunt Western), and premarital and extramarital sexuality (Bridget, Harriet Fitzpatrick) – emerging in the end as a vigorous proponent of romantic and marital love (70–1). The corruption of marriage for love (upon which topic Allworthy delivers a panegyric to Doctor Blifil [70–2]) into its most odious obverse (‘a … Sacrifice to Lust, or Avarice’ [71]; ‘legal Prostitution for Hire’ [866]), is the tendency that Fielding most deplores. Such loveless unions are epitomized not only in Tom’s bondage to Lady Bellaston but also, most significantly, in Squire Western’s plans to marry Sophia for the purpose of keeping her out of the hands of a lord and joining his estate to that of Allworthy: thus, Squire Western’s message to Lord Fellamar through his mediator, ‘tell un the Girl is disposed of already … my Daughter is bespoke already’ (836). The narrator’s comparison of the Squire with a ‘Tradesman,’ a ‘Bawd,’ and a ‘Turnkey’ (840), as with Richardson’s use of the language of commodification to describe Clarissa’s proposed union with Solmes, underscores Fielding’s antipathy for forced marriages, which he likens explicitly to ‘Prostitution’ (840). Throughout Tom Jones, Fielding propounds the view that the liberty to act in

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accordance with one’s romantic desires is essential, preferable by far to being manipulated as a pawn in a Richardsonian game of ‘Matrimonial Politics’ (860) (as Aunt Western tries to use Sophia to prove her ascendancy over her brother and procure for her niece ‘a Title and a large Estate’ [865]). Though, at the novel’s close, Sophia feigns compliance with her father’s commands, her energy and wit make clear that she chooses Tom to please herself. Nancy’s plight is not resolved with the same gusto, the situation of the Millers, as in so many other ways in this novel, shedding a sober light on Fielding’s treatment of love choices in Tom Jones. Nancy’s predicament (the impropriety of her affair with her mother’s ‘gentleman’ lodger, Nightingale’s dubious code of honour, Mrs Miller’s complicity in Nancy’s tragedy, the social issues that are raised by this cross-class liaison) points vividly (if not melodramatically) to the unusual vulnerability of women in matters of love, a topic to which Fielding will return in Amelia. Nancy’s near-tragedy reminds the reader of the deep implicatedness of power and class, with Bridget and Nancy enjoying very different resolutions to their troublesome affairs. Nancy’s warm heart – her affection, loyalty, and ingenuousness – are attributes that at once endear and endanger her and Tom’s judgment of her – that she has ‘sinned more against Prudence than Virtue’ (768) – reiterates Fielding’s vigorous preference for a moral code that, especially in cases of affection, is yielding and humane rather than inflexible and retributive. Eros, the god of physical love, presides warmly over Tom Jones, largely because Fielding connects his mission so closely to that of Agape (a love that is at once higher and more ‘philosophical’).7 The drive of ‘Appetite’ (52) is explicitly treated in Tom’s involvement with Molly, Mrs Waters, and Lady Bellaston as well as in the activities of ancillary characters such as Bridget (her affair with the clergyman Sommers and her pre-marital involvement with Captain Blifil) and Harriet Fitzpatrick (the war with her aunt over Mr Fitzpatrick, the tale of Fitzpatrick’s infidelity, and Mrs Fitzpatrick’s relationship with the ‘noble Peer’). Sophia’s liveliness and her attraction to Tom, along with the repeated encomia on the handsomeness and goodness of Fielding’s hero and heroine, suggest that Fielding’s best characters are possessed of a vigorous bodily presence that enhances and testifies to their good nature. Indeed, Fielding tends (with certain exceptions – most notably, Harriet Fitzpatrick, Lady Bellaston, and Lord Fellamar) to associate sexual energy with those qualities of generosity and goodness that are endorsed throughout his work. This is not to say that Tom’s sexual activities – or those of other characters such as Nancy Miller, Bridget Allworthy, and Harriet Fitzpatrick – are not problematic. Allworthy sonorously condemns the vice of incontinence in the hearings of both Jenny Jones and Tom, and Molly’s promiscuity, as well

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as that of Mrs Waters and Lady Bellaston, is not meant to reflect favourably on her ‘character.’ Nancy’s ‘slip’ nearly costs her her life. As is the case with other manifestations of excess, the ‘problem’ of Tom’s sexual appetite (with which Fielding is chiefly concerned) is thrown into relief by its opposite: the calculated passionlessness of Blifil, who epitomizes the inertia and pathology of the desexualized state.8 That Tom’s maturation involves a proper focusing of his sexual energies upon the woman who deserves his favour suggests that Fielding does not so much recommend a reining in of desire as encourage an understanding of the happy and not so happy consequences of exercising it. Though Fielding complicates his treatment of this issue by getting his main character ‘off the hook’ in ways that might suggest that he is treating the need for sexual responsibility lightly or misogynistically (creating Will Barnes almost ex nihilo, and unveiling Square in Molly’s bedroom – incidents that function less to excuse Tom than to divert specific attention from his situation – and concocting the preposterous ruse of the fake marriage proposal to disembarrass Tom of Lady Bellaston), he goes to some length to emphasize Tom’s (naïve) sense of responsibility to Molly and her family as well as to Lady Bellaston, whose character he has ingenuously misread. Mrs Waters, Molly, and Lady Bellaston, clearly assume the more aggressive posture in seducing Tom, and hence bear the greater burden of responsibility in those affairs. Physical beauty, for Fielding, often serves as the catalyst for affection or love, in large part because, from Fielding’s perspective, a genial ‘outside’ is indissolubly connected to a character’s good nature. For this reason, and because the business of social intercourse depends so heavily on ‘read[ing] … Countenance[s]’ (450) (an activity with which, as throughout Clarissa, the transitional sections of Tom Jones are largely engaged), skill in physiognomy, which nearly all characters in Tom Jones profess to have, is essential.9 Though some landlords subscribe to the professional dictum, Fronti nulla fides (‘you can’t always know the Inside by the Outside’ [379]), it is clear that Fielding believed the opposite, and if some are beguiled by the sanctimonious demeanour of a Blifil, it is more a reflection of their lack of penetration than a demonstration of how misleading surfaces can be. As Fielding observes in ‘An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,’ ‘Nature doth really imprint sufficient Marks in the Countenance, to inform an accurate and discerning Eye’ (Miscellanies 161). The significance of the obvious (to use Loewenberg’s expression), of the outside, is not only an epistemological tenet of Fielding but also a cornerstone of his ethical theme in Tom Jones. For, as the author advises the reader in reflecting on the ways in which Tom’s ‘Wantonness’ (141) has injured him in the eyes of Allworthy, the care and preservation of a ‘fair Outside’ is neglected at one’s peril. Fielding accordingly advises his readers,

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The importance of this homily is reinforced not only by its timing (it marks the crucial shift of Allworthy’s favour from Tom to Blifil) but also by the fact that it is announced as a rare appearance of ‘the Author himself’ ‘by way of Chorus’ (140–1) on stage, to ensure that his discovery of ‘the Rocks on which Innocence and Goodness often split’ (142) is not misunderstood. In focusing attention on the importance of ‘Outside[s],’ Fielding encourages us to note the ways in which inner nature plays itself out on the countenance, and in bodily movements and gestures. Because one’s acts are continually read and assessed by others,10 such an awareness may help to increase the chances that our characters are not misrepresented, either through youthful inattentiveness to appearances or through ignorance of the importance of social ‘projections.’ Richardson shares the assumption underlying this view, propounding, in Clarissa, not only the body’s fluency in relaying information about the self, but also the destabilizing pressures that ‘outside’ readings can exert upon it. Fielding’s prioritization of ‘Outside[s]’ marks his focus as predominantly comic rather than tragic, pointing his divergence from the more interiorized Richardson. Such relocation of attention from inside to out may suggest, in Stumpf’s view, Fielding’s ‘sense of how inaccessible the “inner realities” really are’ (3), but also, perhaps, the superior interest and significance to him of what manifests itself on the ‘Outside.’ ‘The only Ways,’ wrote Fielding in The Champion on 11 December 1739, ‘by which we can come at any Knowledge of what passes in the Minds of others, are their Words and Actions; the latter of which, hath by the wiser Part of Mankind been chiefly depended on, as the surer and more infallible Guide’ (1: 79). ‘[Men should] believe their own Eyes,’ Fielding recommends in ‘An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,’ ‘and judge of Men by what they actually see them perform’ (Miscellanies 175). We are far here, both in theory and in practice, from the unstable theatrical self-presentations of Defoe. Cohesiveness – bringing what is into conjunction with what appears – not only is possible in Fielding’s world but is also an ethical imperative for his best characters. If Fielding has been criticized on the basis of a preference for ‘outsides,’11

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it is not because he was unconcerned with or ignorant of the internal workings of the mind. Both decorum and his comic temper, as well as his allegiance to and (in contrast to Richardson) his trust in the public, social world that validates the goodness of his favourite characters, withhold Fielding from ‘prying’ into the ‘Recesses of [the human] Mind’ (159, 269). Indeed, given the choice, Fielding inevitably shifts from an ‘internal’ to an ‘external’ focus, as exemplified by, among others, the scene in which Allworthy conveys the details of his will and the episode in which Tom attends the performance of Hamlet. In both these cases Fielding deliberately directs attention away from the more cerebral or emotional ‘internal’ tragedy occurring on the stage (or sickbed) to the burlesque enacted by the spectators. Fielding rewards the characters he likes most (Tom, Sophia) with fair outsides. In so doing, he exemplifies his belief in virtue as having, in Allan Wendt’s words, ‘a sensual rather than a merely philosophic embodiment’ (‘Naked Virtue’ 132). Thus, in Tom and Sophia, virtue ‘comes alive’ (in a way that it does not in the more aloof and rational philosopher-father Allworthy) in the vivacity of their countenances, the handsomeness of their figures, and the manner in which their persons and deeds reflect the goodness that is their most compelling trait. Fielding’s hero, from his boyhood, is described in terms that make clear ‘the uncommon Comeliness of his Person’ (175). Women, in particular, are drawn to him by ‘the Beauty of his Person [and] the Whiteness of his Skin’ (205), ‘the most whitest,’ as Honour says, ‘that ever was seen’ (205). Sophia agrees: ‘he is certainly a pretty Fellow’ (205) (terms that will reverberate, less innocently, in London: Mrs Fitzpatrick, whose maid grants entrance to Tom on the basis of his civility and the ‘Comeliness of his Person’ [692], declares that he is ‘a very pretty Fellow, and I don’t wonder that … so many Women are fond of him’ [693]). Indeed, Tom’s handsomeness appears to act magnetically upon the female world of fashion in London, his looks drawing to him Mrs Fitzpatrick, Arabella Hunt, and the infamous Lady Bellaston. The narrator frequently remarks on Tom’s handsomeness (223). As he descends the staircase at Upton in preparation for his ill-fated rendezvous with Mrs Waters, he opines that ‘the fair Adonis was not a lovelier Figure’ (415). Mrs Waters declares that he resembles an ‘Angel’ more than a Man (496), and the narrator applauds and elaborates upon this comparison: Indeed he was a charming Figure [he remarks], and if a very fine Person, and a most comely Set of Features, adorned with Youth, Health, Strength, Freshness, Spirit and Good-Nature, can make a Man resemble an Angel, he certainly had that Resemblance. (496)

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The panegyric is amplified a few pages later (the volume, as it will later in the Bellaston/Enderson section of Tom Jones, rising to counterbalance Tom’s coming indiscretions with Mrs Waters) in the narrator’s warmest tribute to Tom’s person: Mr. Jones, of whose personal Accomplishments we have hitherto said very little, was in reality, one of the handsomest young Fellows in the World. His Face, besides being the Picture of Health, had in it the most apparent Marks of Sweetness and Good-Nature. These Qualities were indeed so characteristical in his Countenance, that while the Spirit and Sensibility in his Eyes, tho’ they must have been perceived by an accurate Observer, might have escaped the Notice of the less discerning, so strongly was this Good-nature painted in his Look, that it was remarked by almost every one who saw him. (510)

Notable here is Fielding’s insistence that it is Tom’s good nature and spirit, embodied, as it were, in his handsome features, that constitute his personal charm. And, as is the case with his predecessor, Joseph Andrews, Tom is distinguished by an intoxicating mixture of masculine and ‘effeminate’ qualities. He has a ‘very fine Complection’ and his face has ‘a Delicacy in it almost inexpressible, and which might have given him an Air rather too effeminate, had it not been joined to a most masculine Person and Mein; which latter had as much in them of the Hercules, as the former had of the Adonis. He was besides active, genteel, gay and good-humoured, and had a Flow of Animal Spirits, which enlivened every Conversation where he was present’ (510). As with the earlier references to Tom’s ‘Comeliness,’ the comparisons to Adonis will recur more salaciously in London. Lady Bellaston, visiting Tom on his supposed sickbed, observes that he ‘might … sit for the Picture of Adonis’ (810). Towards the end of the novel, as Tom briefly enters the ambit of Harriet Fitzpatrick, allusions to his ‘perfect Beauty’ (870), ‘consummate Beauty’ (870), and ‘true Tenderness’ (which ‘few Women ever meet with … in Men’ [870]) reemphasize the attractiveness of Fielding’s hero, suggesting that Tom is indeed, as Lady Bellaston puts it, ‘a kind of Miracle in Nature’ (695). Sophia’s beauty is similarly proclaimed. Because she is, as Martin Battestin and Allan Wendt have argued, virtue personified, ‘the Idea of Virtue incarnate’ (Battestin, Providence of Wit 181), and because Fielding (unlike Richardson in Clarissa) believes that such virtue may be enacted in the sublunary sphere, her ‘perfect Beauty’ (537) reflects both the attractiveness of divine wisdom and the manifestation of such wisdom in the human world. If Sophia’s beauty is presented more iconically than that of Richardson’s Clarissa (whose more detailed and dynamic physical portrayals are complicated

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by the eroticized or eagerly propitiative perspective of Lovelace), it is perhaps because Fielding aims to create a standard of mortal beauty that will be recognizable by and available to all. Indeed, Allworthy’s warm and wise tribute to female beauty in his sermon to Doctor Blifil (71), and the narrator’s comment on the irresistibility of ‘perfect Beauty’ (870), are epitomized in Sophia, who is introduced with great (if ironic) fanfare in Book IV, chapter ii. If Fielding here exercises his wit in overinflating his description of his heroine (‘A short Hint of what we can do in the Sublime’ [154]), such a comedic interlude does not obscure the fact that Sophia’s breathtaking beauty elevates her above the conventional standards of feminine perfection, that she is possessed of a beauty that is at once ‘historical’ (she is like the pictures of the Countess of Ranelagh and the Duchess of Mazarin), autobiographical (she resembles Fielding’s first wife, Charlotte Cradock), and literary. As is usual for Fielding in his wittiest passages, his introduction of Sophia ‘“in the Sublime” style,’ as Martin Battestin points out, ‘is both playful and serious, mocking the extravagancies of romance while at the same time invoking the old values of honour and virtue which romance celebrates’ (Providence of Wit 182). As Fielding draws and then demolishes such analogues in his description of his female ‘Paragon’ (156), the specificity of Sophia’s final portrait roots her, sensibly (and sensually) in the real world, contrasting pointedly with that of Tom, whose features are, interestingly, never described in any detail. Sophia’s beauty, reiterated throughout Tom Jones – the landlady at Upton declares that she had ‘never seen so lovely a Creature’ (537–8); the narrator speaks of Sophia’s ‘perfect Beauty’ (537; cf. 536); Tom and others repeatedly refer to her as an angel – is, like Tom’s, inextricable from her goodness. As Fielding moves from Sophia’s physical description, which serves to elevate his heroine (with references to proportion, symmetry, luxuriance, and spirit, and with an emphasis on hyperbole – ‘the highest Beauties of the famous Venus de Medicis were outdone [in her neck]’ [157]) and at the same time humorously picks at the standards of perfect loveliness (‘her Forehead might have been higher without Prejudice to her’; ‘her Chin [was rather] large’ [156, 157]), to a discussion of her mind, it is made clear that Sophia’s truest beauty is, like that of Fielding’s later heroine Amelia, internal, or, rather, that the sweetness and affability of her temper constitute her loveliness: Such was the Outside of Sophia; nor was this beautiful Frame disgraced by an Inhabitant unworthy of it. Her Mind was every way equal to her Person; nay, the latter borrowed some Charms from the former; for when she smiled, the Sweetness of her Temper diffused that Glory over her Countenance, which no regularity of Features can give. (157)

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Here it is above all the warmth of Fielding’s tribute to Sophia (seen also in the moving association that he makes between Sophia and Charlotte Cradock [156]) that encourages the reader’s love and desire for Fielding’s character. With Sophia, ‘inside’ informs outside, as Tom’s fervent tribute to Nightingale and the famous mirror passage at the end of Tom Jones show. To Nightingale’s question about Sophia’s honour, Tom answers, ‘The sweetest Air is not purer, the limpid Stream not clearer than her Honour. She is all over, both in Mind and Body, consummate Perfection. She is the most beautiful Creature in the Universe; and yet she is Mistress of such noble, elevated Qualities, that though she is never from my Thoughts, I scarce ever think of her Beauty, but when I see it’ (818). The cohesion of inner and outer beauty, of abstract and concrete, is reiterated in one of the novel’s last, most symbolically weighted scenes, in which Tom, challenged by Sophia to prove his allegiance to her, leads her to a mirror: ‘There, behold it there, in that lovely Figure, in that Face, that Shape, those Eyes, that Mind which shines through those Eyes: Can the Man who shall be in Possession of these be inconstant? Impossible! my Sophia. They would fix a Dorimant, a Lord Rochester’ (973). It is not, as Sophia’s clever rejoinder to Tom suggests, merely Sophia’s physical impression that ‘fixes’ Tom, but a quality of her character that that impression conveys, a quality that, however, does not so much supersede her loveliness (and suggest that one should strive for a platonic appreciation of beauty ‘beyond’ the flesh, for, as Fielding says, he knows of few who actually value such an exercise), as enhance it, creating a love that can be celebrated both ethically and practically, as Tom’s ardent embrace of Sophia (974) attests. The physicality of Tom’s love of Sophia is stressed repeatedly in these last passages of the novel, not only through Western’s hearty references to venery and sexual satisfaction but also in Fielding’s earthy refiguring of Allworthy’s happy (if clichéd) descriptions of Tom’s reform: ‘Nephew,’ cries Allworthy, ‘I felicitate you most heartily; for I think you are the happiest of Men. And Madam, you will give me leave to congratulate you on this joyful Occasion; indeed I am convinced you have bestowed yourself on one who will be sensible of your great Merit, and who will at least use his best Endeavours to deserve it.’ ‘His best Endeavours!’ cries Western, ‘that he will I warrant un. – Harkee, Allworthy, I’ll bet thee five Pound to a Crown we have a Boy to-morrow nine Months.’ (975–6)

The tension that characterizes Fielding’s representation of Sophia – she is both ‘the woman that Tom loves, [and] the emblem and embodiment of that ideal Wisdom her name signifies’ (Battestin, Providence of Wit 185), both real and

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allegorical, physical and ideal – underscores Fielding’s conviction that virtue may be attained on earth, that the principles that he reveres – goodness, energy, order, virtue – can be incarnated in real men and women and works of goodness thereby performed in the real world.12 Thus Sophia, as a fictional character, engages both a dramatic world of action and a more stable realm of icon and abstraction. If, to critics such as Ian Watt (Rise of the Novel 267, 272–3), Sophia is insufficiently ‘realized’ (especially in comparison to the characters of Richardson, Inchbald, and Shelley, for whom passage to the outward world of expression is often torturous and dark [Clarissa’s posture as she runs from her father’s house, Miss Milner as her knife and fork spring in her hand]), it is not true that she betrays no ‘inner’ vitality at all. Indeed, her blushing, an act that Fielding once calls, in reference to Blifil, ‘giv[ing] Evidence against [oneself]’ (932), repeatedly testifies to a private life that is at odds with her public role. Sophia blushes as she describes Tom to Susan at Upton (544), at evidence of Tom’s attachment to her (207), and as she reads about love (287). She reddens at Mrs Miller’s encomia about Tom (895–6) and changes colour at the report of the proposal of the widow Arabella Hunt (963). Such turbulence within, a force that defies, perhaps, rational or strictly decorous translation, is evidence of the vivid energy of Fielding’s characters. At those awkward or helpless moments when private emotions surge to the surface (when Tom and Sophia blush at the mention of each other’s names, when Nancy faints away in company after having received the dismissal from Nightingale), Fielding tends to frame such events in ways that pose problems not for the reader’s assessment of his fiction’s characters but for the story’s plot: these are signals of conflicts that will need to be ‘fixed,’ of emotions that will need to be ‘aligned’ in some public, conventional way: Tom and Sophia must be reunited; Nancy must be married to Nightingale. Because such moments are coded so simply – as when Sophia’s spirits, ‘in a visible Flutter’ (219) from her awareness of Tom’s interest in her, cause her to play the piano ‘intolerably ill’ (219) – the reader’s attention is not so much pulled ‘downward’ or ‘inwards’ into Sophia’s psyche (as in the case of Clarissa and Miss Milner) as it is directed outwards, into the space of the drama, towards an appraisal of how Tom and Sophia’s mutual affection will be realized in the world in which they live. At the very least, inward vigour – and its tendency to rise to the surface – certifies a commitment to a world in which action is meaningful and exertion, particularly when it is directed towards a constructive or benevolent end, is applauded.13 Robert Alter and Martin Price, among other critics, have pointed to the crucial importance of energy in Fielding’s assessment and presentation of character in Tom Jones (Alter, Fielding 88–94; Price 286–93). Price discusses

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Fielding’s emphasis on ‘the energies of virtue’ (286) and ‘the active energy of virtuous feeling’ (287). Alter argues that characters in Tom Jones are ‘individuated largely in terms of their levels of energy [which incorporates, variously, ‘animal spirits’; emotional, physical, and mental vitality; appetite; and libido, sexuality] and the ways they use or abuse that energy’ (Fielding 88). Early reviewers of Tom Jones commented on the vitality of the novel: the author of An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding described it as ‘perhaps the most lively Book ever publish’d’ (43–4); Coleridge, in his ‘Notes on Tom Jones,’ remarked, famously, on the ‘cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails every where’ (302).14 From the beginning, Tom is a boy of ‘Spirit’ (166). He enters the novel in pursuit of a partridge, in which sport he is ‘excessively eager’ (120), even ‘importunate’ (120). That this energy must eventually be more aptly managed, and trained on a nobler object, is suggested in Fielding’s portrayal of Tom as verging on the marginal, his first act in the novel linking him with the decidedly liminal (if not criminal) Black George. The legal significance of the act of trespass in which the two are jointly engaged (as well as Tom’s ‘noble’ concealment of Black George) forecasts not only the difficulty of judging Tom within the parameters of absolute law but also the volatility of the kind of benevolence that he will exhibit throughout the novel, from his continued loyalty to Black George, to his gratitude towards Mrs Waters, to his sense of indebtedness to Lady Bellaston. Indeed, ‘natural Goodness of Heart’ (129), which impels Tom to protect his friend from the consequences of their rashness, is, to Fielding, testified to mainly by a kind of energy, action, or spirit devoted, benevolently, to the happiness or welfare of another, and is a trait that Fielding values above the letter of the law, to which it is often, problematically, opposed. Tom’s spirit, because it may manifest itself as a lack of restraint (as ‘Wantonness, Wildness, and Want of Caution’ [141], or in the reckless riding to which both Tom and Squire Western are drawn), is often ‘officially’ criticized through Allworthy or the narrator (as in the famous speeches on prudence [141, 216, 244]), but it is more often celebrated (emotionally, dramatically, by Fielding), as when Tom hustles Blifil after he is insulted, meanly, with the misfortune of his birth (254). Indeed, Tom’s ‘passionate’ (130) (‘violent,’ ‘animal’ [252]) nature is made nowhere more attractive than in contrast to his half brother’s strange emotionlessness, a state that borders on inertia or torpor. Blifil’s temper is marked by a ‘sober and prudent Reserve’ (253). His inertness is exemplified in the initial description of the two boys, which characterizes Tom by his actions (robbing) and Blifil by his qualities (‘sober, discreet, and pious beyond his Age’ [118]). Such traits not only are unchildlike (and hence unsettling, unnatural), but also suggest the inhuman. Indeed, Blifil’s strange lack of

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engagement with the outside world marks him as morbidly self-centred, and hence devious and self-serving.15 Allworthy’s surprise at Blifil’s ‘cold’ (284) response to Western’s proposal underscores the pathology of Blifil’s self-control: ‘Allworthy was naturally a Man of Spirit, and his present Gravity arose from true Wisdom and Philosophy, not from any original Phlegm in his Disposition: For he had possessed much Fire in his Youth, and had married a beautiful Woman for Love’ (284). The scarcity of ‘Fire’ in Blifil, his ‘Phlegm,’ indicates the tenuousness of his membership in the human community. The network of relationships in which he situates himself, epitomized by his allegiance to the deeply antagonistical Thwackum and Square, and his stranglehold on the keeper of the family secret, Lawyer Dowling, reflects neither emotional truth nor moral coherence; it is commercial and strategic and is designed to advance the interests solely of himself. Tom’s ‘Flow of Animal Spirits’ (510) (his ‘naturally violent animal Spirits’ [252]) invests his character with a spontaneity that Fielding loves, particularly because it examples the instinctive benevolence of his nature. Good nature is, to Fielding, an active principle preeminently. ‘What signifies knowing your Duty,’ asks the inimitable Parson Adams, ‘if you do not perform it?’ (Joseph Andrews 266).16 Thus, Tom ‘immediately’ (160) strips off his coat to rescue the bird so coldly and deliberately released by Blifil; he rushes to Molly’s assistance in the churchyard, ‘scour[ing] the whole Coast of the Enemy, as well as any of Homer’s Heroes’ (183). At the news of Molly’s arrest, he runs home at six miles per hour (192). When Sophia’s horse rears in fright, threatening to throw Sophia off its back, Tom ‘immediately’ gallops to her aid (200). He hurries ‘instantly’ into the chariot at the news of Allworthy’s illness, forgetting all thoughts of love (242). Hearing the threats of the ruffians, he ‘instantly’ goes to the rescue of the Man of the Hill and dispatches the thieves with his broadsword (447). The same instinctive and immediate action characterizes his rescue of Mrs Waters (as the Man of the Hill sits dispassionately atop his vantage point) (495), his assault upon Northerton (496), his interposition on behalf of the Merry Andrew (649), his assistance of Nightingale (702), and his management of the issue of Nancy Miller (769). Though Allworthy will caution Tom, memorably, on the need for prudence (216, 244), this is a quality that is closer to circumspection than to restraint. Fielding does not associate prudence with deprivation or privation, but with a balanced abundance (282–3); it does not operate to the exclusion of appetite and passion (282). Worst and most sinister of all would be to have, as Blifil does, no passions to control (284). Tom’s spirit makes him noble, as Sophy knows from his youth (she calls him, to Honour, ‘a Boy of a noble Spirit’ [166]). It draws others to him in that gesture of sociability that is the stamp of good nature: ‘Half [of Tom’s] natural Flow of animal

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Spirits,’ the narrator writes, describing the disconsolate Tom at the home of the Millers, ‘joined to the Sweetness of his Temper, was sufficient to make a most amiable Companion’ (705). Tom’s energy is a more youthful manifestation of the passionate temper and spontaneous benevolence of Parson Adams. It is carefully differentiated from the animal exuberance of Squire Western (though it is not entirely unrelated to it, as Alter argues [Fielding 88–94]) and from the ‘spirit’ (rapacity) encouraged by Lady Bellaston (‘all Women love,’ she coaches the hesitating Lord Fellamar, ‘a Man of Spirit’ [794]), as well as from the ‘high mettle’ of the incautious and unruly Man of the Hill (453), whose story and nature provide an admonitory contrast to those of Tom. Sophia, too, has a ‘remarkable Sprightliness in her Temper’ (167), her plan to escape ‘by walking out of the Doors’ (351) attesting to both her strength of will and her bodily stamina. ‘My Legs … have supported me many a long Evening, after a Fiddle, with no very agreeable Partner,’ she tells the reluctant Honour; ‘and surely they will assist me in running from so detestable a Partner for Life’ (351). Sophia, the narrator writes approvingly, ‘with all the Gentleness which a Woman can have, had all the Spirit which she ought to have’ (559). In facilitating Sophia’s escape and subtly alluding to and manipulating the elements of Clarissa’s tragedy (as Sophia walks confidently out of her father’s house and enters into a more complicated ‘freedom’ under Lady Bellaston), Fielding, in contrast to Richardson, who articulates the questions of intention and action more anxiously, underscores the supreme importance of wilful action in a world in which personal freedom is often imperilled. A passionate nature can also lead one astray, as is exemplified both in the story of the imprudent – even criminal, and eventually misanthropic – Man of the Hill and in the tale of his female counterpart, Harriet Fitzpatrick, as well as, most centrally, in Tom’s liaisons with women, namely Molly and Mrs Waters. (Such an idea will be accorded more complex treatment in Amelia – in Fielding’s development of the improvident Booth – and in Inchbald’s A Simple Story.) That such impulsiveness is attractive to women is suggested by the hint that Sophia responds with interest to this libidinal energy in Tom. As Western puts it, ‘You have not the worse Opinion of a young Fellow for getting a Bastard, have you, Girl? No, no, the Women will like un the better for’t’ (190), and Fielding times the revelation of the incident of Molly to coincide with Sophia’s awareness of her own passion for Tom (190). Tom’s reputation for being ‘one of the wildest Fellows in England’ (295) does not ‘render [Tom] odious to [Sophia],’ as Blifil opines (295). Indeed, Fielding represents female sexual desire fairly explicitly in Tom Jones, calling attention to Sophia’s attraction to Tom (167–9, 171)17 as well as noting repeatedly Tom’s attractiveness to other

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women. From wives made irascible by the waning efforts of their husbands (Mrs Partridge, the landlady of the house in which Tom is wounded by Northerton) to Mrs Waters’s systematic seduction of Tom en route to and at Upton, to Aunt Western’s presumed interest in younger men (‘her Complexion is amorous … liquorish,’ Mrs Fitzpatrick tells the startled Tom [868]), Fielding’s women are as receptive to sexual desire as are his men. Succumbing to Tom, in rapid succession, are Molly Seagrim, Sophia, Mrs Waters, Lady Bellaston, Mrs Hunt (‘a very warm Constitution’ [826]), Mrs Fitzpatrick (who ‘[begins] to feel a Somewhat for Mr. Jones’ [870]), as well as various female members of the serving class. Even Bridget (herself a covert – and, indeed, for the plot, the most significant – violator of the law of chastity) is made to seem inclined to Tom (139–40, 170), a constellation that resurfaces in the threat of incest that nearly undermines Tom’s attainment of Sophia towards the novel’s close. That female desire plays a significant role in marital love is suggested at the novel’s end as Western cheerfully decodes and abbreviates Sophia’s decorous stalling. He speaks of Tom’s ‘tousling’ his daughter (970) and declares that the trial she assigns Tom is ‘all Flimflam. Zoodikers! she’d have the Wedding to-Night with all her Heart’ (974). His exuberant references to the consummation of Tom and Sophia’s marriage (976) and the narrator’s record of ‘that happy Hour which … surrendered the charming Sophia to the eager Arms of her enraptured Jones’ (979) underline the inextricability of sensual and spiritual love, a dictum that Fielding outlines in Book XIV, chapter i, in which, in a crucial passage in the novel, he laments the displacement of passion by the crude desires of vanity and ambition (743–4): There is not indeed a greater Error than that which universally prevails among the Vulgar, who … have affixed the Character of Lewdness to these Times. On the contrary, I am convinced there never was less of Love Intrigue carried on among Persons of Condition, than now. Our present Women have been taught by their Mothers to fix their Thoughts only on Ambition and Vanity, and to despise the Pleasures of Love as unworthy their Regard; and being afterwards, by the Care of such Mothers, married without having Husbands, they seem pretty well confirmed in the Justness of those Sentiments … In my humble Opinion, the true Characteristick of the present Beau Monde, is rather Folly than Vice, and the only Epithet which it deserves is that of Frivolous. (743–4)

Aunt Western subscribes to such a view of love as business, expounding to Sophia ‘the Example of the polite World, where Love (so the good Lady said) is at present entirely laughed at, and where Women consider Matrimony, as Men do Offices of public Trust, only as the Means of making their Fortunes,

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and of advancing themselves in the World’ (316). (Fielding archly calls these talks ‘Lectures of Prudence’ [316].) Just this side of loveless attachment is platonic affection, ‘absolutely detached from the Flesh … entirely and purely spiritual,’ of which the narrator flatly declares that he has never seen an instance (852). Indeed, as the famous scene of the exposure of the philosopher Square in Molly’s bedroom proves, the pursuit of sexual satisfaction is a fundamental activity of humankind. Though there is, to be sure, a darker side to the ‘trafficking’ of Molly (as there is in the enumeration of Will Barnes’s other mistresses, one of whom is said to have drowned herself in despair or to have been drowned by him [234–5]), on the whole the act of indulging ‘a natural Appetite’ (233) is regarded with a comic and forgiving air. It is when sexual desires are thwarted and then trained destructively upon others, as in Lady Bellaston’s plot to have Sophia ravished by Lord Fellamar or in Blifil’s vaguer plans to rifle Sophia, that the comic atmosphere evaporates. Though Fielding, in the episodes involving the novel’s sexual sophisticates, Lady Bellaston, Harriet Fitzpatrick, and Lord Fellamar, aims to reveal the venality – and tedium – of city life, he is intrigued by a quality of ‘natural’ (rather than learned) gentility (370, 444, 449, 431, 433), a gentleness that Tom inherits not only by virtue of his birth but also through his innate delicacy and attentiveness to others. This is an attribute that is, importantly, expressed and experienced by and through the body. The combination of gentility and spirit produces in Tom an inclination to gallantry, an attentiveness to women that mediates between passion and politesse, a refined, almost courtly allegiance to the code of love. Though Fielding makes clear his disapproval of the logic behind Tom’s engagement with Lady Bellaston, Tom is made to seem both more attractive and more vulnerable by the overtures of the experienced woman of fashion: ‘Jones [writes Fielding] had never less Inclination to an Amour than at present; but Gallantry to the Ladies was among his Principles of Honour; and he held it as much incumbent on him to accept a Challenge to Love, as if it had been a Challenge to Fight’ (715). Tom escapes the reader’s condemnation here – indeed, even earns his approval – because of the way in which he attempts to carry an old-fashioned code (‘Gallantry’) into a world that has become vitiated and strategic, in which Eros and not etiquette dictates relations between men and women. Tom’s ‘natural Gallantry’ (167; cf. 133, 139) is connected with – indeed, is a manifestation of – his good nature, not his sexual appetite, though the two are connected. As the narrator says, ‘Young Men of open, generous Dispositions are naturally inclined to Gallantry’ (166), by which he means ‘an obliging, complaisant Behaviour to all Women in general’ (166). Thus (though his behaviour in the incident of the

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partridge is also referred to as gallant [133] because it is noble, selfless), Tom begins, at twenty, ‘to have the Name of a pretty Fellow among all the Women in the Neighbourhood’ (166). His personal appeal is part of his charm, proclaiming his energetic participation in a world that stands in happy contradistinction to one of ‘social alienation, competitiveness, and fluidity … where old duties and connections have crumbled and the self has become contingent’ (those conditions, according to Charles Lindholm, that favour charismatic movements [184]). Thus, Tom’s offering of his right arm to Sophia after his left arm has been broken by her fall from her horse is the quintessential act of gallantry (215): polished, devoted, oblivious to his own personal needs and situation. Gallantry is also, Fielding suggests, a manifestation of Tom’s moral and emotional generosity (166), an attribute of his character that Fielding contrasts both with Nightingale’s self-centred ‘rakishness’ and Blifil’s closed meanspiritedness. Tom ‘spends,’ in the ‘Openness of his Heart’ (563), spilling his passion for Sophia in ways that offend her delicacy on the road. Such are the attributes of a ‘warm Disposition’ (677), preferable by far to the safe certainties of a cold one (677), the negative side to which, however, is a certain vulnerability to manipulation by others – for example, Lady Bellaston, Molly, Blifil – a naïveté that will pass with the acquisition of prudence. With generosity is associated the spontaneous benevolence that prompts Tom to relieve the Endersons and to address the problem of Nancy and Nightingale at a time when he is deeply preoccupied by his own situation; generosity also underpins his continued attention to the Seagrim family (his selflessness highlighted by Black George’s pilfering of Tom’s money after he is exiled from the house of Allworthy). With generosity is linked spirit – ‘Extravagance, or rather Ebullience of … Passion’ (563) – and ‘Humanity’ (706, 768), service to others, as is the focus when Tom urges Nightingale to behave nobly to the Millers. ‘Luk[king] furst at ome,’ in the immortal orthography of Honour (825), is an attribute of the selfish (like the turncoat Honour and her employer Lady Bellaston; like Mrs Fitzpatrick, whose preoccupation with the plight of Sophia does not mask from the reader her deeper concern with reconciling herself to her aunt). Like ‘Prudence,’ ‘Honour,’ and ‘Gallantry,’ ‘Generosity’ is a term often applied ironically in an attempt to clarify its true meaning, as is the case with Lady Bellaston, whose munificence is monetary, having nothing to do with the benevolence that is Fielding’s deepest concern. As Tom says about Blifil, ‘I own I never greatly liked him. I thought he wanted that Generosity of Spirit, which is the sure Foundation of all that is great and noble in Human Nature. I saw a Selfishness in him long ago which I despised’ (657). Passion and openness, ‘Generosity of Spirit,’ are physical attributes, the moral manifestation of which is goodness.

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Though Fielding emphatically promotes openness over closedness, and vigour over ‘Phlegm,’18 Tom’s sexual escapades (especially his relations with Molly) are meant to reflect his spirit and naïveté, not to celebrate incontinence for its own sake. Though Western applauds Tom’s (supposed) liaison with Molly (‘Ah, Tom, Tom; thou art a liquorish Dog’ [266]) (approving ‘the recruiting those Numbers which we are every Day losing in the War’ [267]), Fielding’s emphasis throughout is not on Tom’s wantonness but on his uncommon attractiveness to women (‘no body can deny but that Mr. Jones is one of the most handsomest young Men that ever –’ Honour rattles to Sophia after Tom rushes from the table after the news of Molly’s arrest. ‘Every body says it as well as I’ [197]) and on his artlessness. Tom is repeatedly cast as the less sexually experienced of the two in the affair(s) with Molly, as is also the case with Lady Bellaston in London,19 and his attempt to apply a code of honour to both Molly and Lady Bellaston is meant to be seen as delightfully archaic and overdelicate. When Tom discovers Square in Molly’s bedroom, despite his protestations that the ‘Indulgence of a natural Appetite’ (233) is both innocent and laudable (especially, apparently, when practiced on a member of the lower class), Fielding, in fact, does not unreservedly endorse this view, and is much less interested here in the pleasures of the flesh than in hypocrisy, the unmasking of the philosopher Square, who has pretended to be above carnal desires (230). Tom’s honesty about his dealings with Molly (‘Lookee, Mr. Nightingale … I have been guilty with Women’ [755]) is admired more than the dealings themselves, as is his earlier willingness to take responsibility for his acts of self-indulgence. Those who sate themselves sexually (Harriet Fitzpatrick, the youthful Man of the Hill, Lady Bellaston) are hardly celebrated for their lubriciousness. In contexts in which personal and ‘passional’ energy is celebrated (as is repeatedly the case with Tom) and coldness and rote actions condemned (as is the pattern with Thwackum, Square, Blifil, the Quaker, the brothers Nightingale), important ethical concepts such as prudence, generosity, liberality, goodness, and honour may require review as a vigorous ‘Constitution’ and ‘Principles’ engage. In such instances the body may serve as a fulcrum for a more complex – and forgiving – definition of moral terms. As Eleanor Hutchens (101–18) and Martin Battestin (Providence of Wit 164–92) have pointed out, prudence is one such concept that Fielding subjects to intensive scrutiny in Tom Jones, exemplifying the variety of its meanings, both negative and positive, across a broad range of characters and situations. In contrast to the moral dictionary of Clarissa, the terms of which describe a narrowing of meaning and an increasing estrangement from the body, generosity, honour, and goodness, too, have their definitions broadened and ‘softened’ in many places

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in Tom Jones: debating the predicament of Nancy, Tom urges Nightingale to embrace a concept of honour that is personal, generous, and specific to the situation, that compels him to accept responsibility for his actions. This is ‘the very best and truest Honour, which is Goodness,’ as Tom tells him, correcting Nightingale’s definition of Honour as ‘the Opinion of the World’ (767). As always in Tom Jones, it is the heart that is the moral touchstone in such cases. In the earlier, analogous instance of Molly, Tom’s heart reaches a conclusion that foreshadows Nightingale’s, frustratingly (temporarily) diverting him from the pursuit of Sophia: The Ruin [of Molly] must, he foresaw, unavoidably attend his deserting her; and this Thought stung him to the Soul. Poverty and Distress seemed to him to give none a Right of aggravating those Misfortunes. The Meanness of her Condition did not represent her Misery as of little Consequence in his Eyes, nor did it appear to justify, or even to palliate, his Guilt, in bringing that Misery upon her. But why do I mention Justification; his own Heart would not suffer him to destroy a human Creature, who, he thought, loved him, and had to that Love sacrificed her Innocence. His own good Heart pleaded her Cause; not as a cold venal Advocate; but as one interested in the Event, and which must itself deeply share in all the Agonies its Owner brought on another. (222)

Sir John Hawkins found such ‘elastic’ principles inimical to the cause of virtue: [Tom Jones is] seemingly intended to sap the foundation of that morality which it is the duty of parents and all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young people, by teaching that virtue upon principle is imposture, that generous qualities alone constitute true worth, and that a young man may love and be loved, and at the same time associate with the loosest women. His morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affections, in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, is that of lord Shaftesbury vulgarised, and is a system of excellent use in palliating the vices most injurious to society. He was the inventor of that cant-phrase, goodness of heart, which is every day used as a substitute for probity, and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog; in short, he has done more towards corrupting the rising generation than any writer we know of. (214–15)20

As Tom charges Nightingale, clarifying the evidence of intimate and specific ratification in defining a virtuous act, ‘Would not your own Heart … applaud [your marriage to Nancy]? And do not the warm, rapturous Sensations, which

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we feel from the Consciousness of an honest, noble, generous, benevolent Action, convey more Delight to the Mind, than the undeserved Praise of Millions?’ (768). Tom’s rousing speeches to Nightingale (‘If I had any foolish Scruples of Honour,’ the repentant Nightingale tells him, ‘you have fully satisfied them’ [769]) are meant to suggest, surely, the degree to which Tom has matured and the extent to which he has inherited and put to even sharper use those principles of honour and goodness that have been taught to him by Allworthy. At Paradise Hall, honourable actions repeatedly fall outside the realm of the conventional: witness Allworthy in his shirt, with the infant’s hand in his, having prematurely called for the ‘prudent’ Deborah (a scene specifically recalled by Allworthy at the novel’s close, as he approaches the all-important reconciliation with Tom); the debate on the release of the bird (which is brought to an abrupt halt by Western’s pronouncement – ‘a generous spirited Action; I have Learning enough to see that’ [164]); and the incidents of ‘the Partridge, the Horse, and the Bible’ (195), in which an appreciation of Tom’s motives urges Allworthy to a more lenient judgment of his ‘crimes.’ In each of these cases, as in the episode of Molly, Tom’s sensitivity to the vulnerability of others impels his actions and dictates the manner in which he deals with the consequences of his deeds. Thus, though in an ‘absolute’ sense, Blifil, for example, may have acted correctly in releasing Sophy’s bird, it is the knowledge of his motive, to which the reader is privy, that dictates the reader’s judgment of him. Tom’s eagerness to take responsibility for Molly’s pregnancy, similarly, impels Allworthy to discharge his mittimus and release her. The reader’s affection and respect for Tom (as well as his disdain for Blifil) grow from such incidents. As Fielding writes of Allworthy, after his lecture to Tom about Molly, Whatever Detestation Mr. Allworthy had to [Incontinence] or to any other Vice, he was not so blinded by it, but that he could discern any Virtue in the guilty Person, as clearly, indeed, as if there had been no Mixture of Vice in the same Character. While he was angry, therefore, with the Incontinence of Jones, he was no less pleased with the Honour and Honesty of his Self-accusation. He began now to form in his Mind that same Opinion of this young Fellow which we hope our Reader may have conceived. And in ballancing his Faults with his Perfections, the latter seemed rather to preponderate. (194)

Tom’s greatness of heart and openness of temper (141), though they may on occasion lead him into temptation, mark him as the novel’s apogee of goodness and encourage a loyalty to him based on the very traits that Fielding values, traits that link him with his ‘father’ Allworthy: ‘Friendship, Generosity, and

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Greatness of Spirit; that is to say … Goodness’ (195). ‘Natural Goodness of Heart’ (129), which is Tom’s primary quality, has to do with physical and emotional spontaneity, with a kind of picaresque instinct that is not of the law,21 with a non-prescriptive application of moral values illustrated in obverse in the dogmatic Thwackum and Square. As Allworthy’s heart is said to ‘[hunger] after Goodness’ (41), so Tom, by the novel’s end, is seen by his adoptive father to be the rightful heir of this moral ‘appetite,’ acting from the heart rather than from the book. Thus, Tom challenges Nightingale in terms that suggest the extreme sensual manifestations of goodness: ‘do not the warm, rapturous Sensations, which we feel from the Consciousness of an honest, noble, generous, benevolent Action, convey more Delight to the Mind, than the undeserved Praise of Millions?’ (768). The high sentimentality of the Miller-Enderson episodes underscores the value of a response from the heart, a response that, interestingly, as in Joseph Andrews, collapses the barriers of class to give us access to a divine benevolence that is shed on rich and poor alike. As Allworthy cries to Tom at the novel’s close in response to his clemency towards his baleful brother, ‘O my Child! to what Goodness have I been so long blind!’ (966). Mrs Miller’s praise, ‘too good … infinitely too good to live in this World’ (967), explicitly conjoins Tom’s concerns for Blifil with a Christian forgiveness of the highest order. Tom’s insistence on continuing to regard Blifil as part of a community that is specifically tied to him and as a being for whose welfare he is thus to some degree responsible (as in the earlier case of Black George) shows him extending the lessons of Allworthy to acts of benevolence that are truly selfless. If, in Tom Jones, the body commits or fuels acts of indiscretion (trespasses, inappropriate liaisons), such improprieties not only appear to illustrate a passionate, generous nature of which Fielding approves, but also, significantly (as they will in theory for Shelley) make possible the higher moral opportunity of taking responsibility for one’s actions, without which exercise one is not, for Fielding, fully human. The contrast with Richardson here is striking: ‘tricked out of [her]self’ at the garden gate, Clarissa assumes blame for an act that she does not in the root sense of the word commit. Her insistence upon taking responsibility for her elopement results in a strangulation of options that eventually leads to her death. For Fielding, the assumption of responsibility for imprudent actions is enfranchising; it is vitalizing and redemptive. Such is not the mean-spirited prostration and tear-shedding in which Blifil engages upon recognizing that his designs have been exposed (967–8), but rather the outright confession of guilt made by Tom in the case of Molly (193) and the resolution to ‘make Amends’ (193). Tom’s decision to stand by Molly (though Fielding will shortly relieve him of this burden) is gen-

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erous and noble, and is the result, furthermore, of a sympathetic breadth of vision that allows him to see, vividly, the consequences of his desertion of her (222). The same plaudit obtains in his spontaneous revelation of himself in the episode of the partridge. Unlike his partner in crime, Black George (who remains concealed in the furze-brake [120] and allows Tom’s punishment), Tom absorbs (literally) the consequences of his unconsidered actions. Though in the episode with the carefree Mrs Waters there appears to be no immediate need to repent (largely because neither party sees his or her deed as transgressive), the ominous appearance of Sophia’s muff on Tom’s empty bed and the later astonishing turn given to the affair by the threat of incest suggest Fielding’s need to punish Tom in some way, both by Sophia’s reminder that he ought to entertain higher aspirations and by Fielding’s hint that Tom’s carelessness may involve him in trouble of a deeper kind. To be sure, Tom execrates himself after the events at Upton, accepting fully the blame for his ‘ill Conduct’ (571). When the incident resurfaces in a far darker form towards the novel’s close, these rhetorical gestures become more strident. In prison, Tom acknowledges sole responsibility for his deeds (‘I have undone myself’ [893], he proclaims to Mrs Miller), attesting his determination to bring his actions and his nature into better alignment: Believe me, Madam [he exclaims to Mrs Miller] … I do not speak the common Cant of one in my unhappy Situation. Before this dreadful Accident happened, I had resolved to quit a Life of which I was become sensible of the Wickedness as well as Folly. I do assure you, notwithstanding the Disturbances I have unfortunately occasioned in your House, for which I heartily ask your Pardon, I am not an abandoned Profligate. Though I have been hurried into Vices, I do not approve a vicious Character; nor will I ever, from this Moment, deserve it. (894)

If Tom seems overly solemn in these scenes (Mrs Waters certainly thinks so, flippantly mocking his concern for Fitzpatrick [911]), it is perhaps because the rhetoric of his self-accusation is a bit over-inflated. He bemoans, for example, the ‘Follies and Vices of which he had been guilty; every one of which, he said, had been attended with such ill Consequences, that he should be unpardonable if he did not take Warning, and quit those vicious Courses for the future’ (911). Tom’s resolution to ‘sin no more’ (911) and his ‘penitential Behaviour’ in general (912) are roundly ridiculed by the genial Mrs Waters, Fielding getting his cake here and eating it too, by suggesting that Tom at once requires such excoriation and yet in fact is not such a vicious character as all that. At the news of the incest, of course, this chorus becomes louder and more self-accusatory, with Tom rejecting a view of himself as Fortune’s pawn and

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accepting, painfully but necessarily, a reading of his acts as originating in decisions that he himself has made: ‘Sure,’ cries Jones, ‘Fortune will never have done with me, till she hath driven me to Distraction. But why do I blame Fortune? I am myself the Cause of all my Misery. All the dreadful Mischiefs which have befallen me, are the Consequences only of my own Folly and Vice.’ (915–16)

Tom’s depiction of himself to Allworthy and Mrs Miller as deservedly punished (959), riddled with Follies and Vices (959, 961–2), is surely excessive and suggests, accordingly, the acute importance of this theme to Fielding. Tom’s maturation, in Fielding’s moral view, requires this degree of self-examination and self-correction, the active reform with which Tom is charged at the novel’s close, at least rhetorically, by Sophia. But the fact that Tom and Sophia’s union is effected by a reintroduction (now rendered farcical) of the paternal tyranny that has caused the trouble in the first place suggests that a reform of Tom’s character, because he is fundamentally good, will not involve so much of a revolution as his penitent speeches suggest. Fielding’s generous view provides an instructive contrast with the darker and more probing perspective of Richardson. If Tom yokes discretion and prudence with liveliness, as the narrator suggests at the end of Tom Jones, this, surely, is as much as the reader can ever hope or desire of Fielding’s hero. At the beginning of Book VII of Tom Jones, Fielding engages in a lengthy comparison of the world and the stage, commenting upon the variety of roles that one actor may play. ‘It is often,’ he remarks, ‘the same Person who represents the Villain and the Heroe; and he who engages your Admiration To-day, will probably attract your Contempt To-Morrow’ (327). ‘In this Instance,’ he notes, ‘Life most exactly resembles the Stage’ (327).22 Fielding’s insistence that we cannot judge a character as evil because of one bad deed underpins his entire philosophy of character in Tom Jones.23 As with an actor who plays multiple parts without ‘becoming’ those roles to which he is assigned, man has a fundamental nature, an essential character that remains unchanged, despite those ‘disguises’ (roles, actions) that he is compelled to assume. Fielding’s stance on this issue stands in striking contrast to Defoe’s uncertain treatment of imposture in Robinson Crusoe. More sure than Defoe – and perhaps even Richardson – of the existence of an authentic self that is stable, Fielding passes responsibility for weighing character to the spectator/reader, and even the actor himself, cautioning that haste to condemn may be destructive, that ‘a single bad Act no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on the Stage’ (328). This is not simply a charge to read with discernment and generosity.

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Indeed, Fielding suggests that in a certain sense a bad ‘act’ may be undertaken without ‘sticking’ to the actor, and such a deed should be judged accordingly: ‘[The Man of Candour] can censure an Imperfection, or even a Vice, without Rage against the guilty Party’ (329). Such a notion that a (bad) action may be discrete, may present itself for judgment without necessarily implicating the man or woman who performs it, stands in dramatic contrast to Richardson’s premise, in Clarissa, that regardless of where actions originate, the self may become stained and permeated, perhaps even fundamentally changed, by the actions of others as those acts are obtruded upon it. Lovelace’s actions in this sense not only mark him as unregenerate, but also threaten to inculpate Clarissa (in the eyes of society and in her own self-assessment). A belief in the essential goodness of man, and in the ability of the ‘bad’ man to reform, stands at the foundation of Fielding’s positive view of human nature in Tom Jones. The best characters, for Fielding, exhibit mixtures of virtue and vice. Even the worst men have elements of goodness in their nature. As Allworthy remarks, ‘there [are] few Characters so absolutely vicious as not to have the least Mixture of Good in them’ (899). It is imperative, under such circumstances, to refrain from hasty judgment. As Tom says to the Man of the Hill, ‘many a Man who commits Evil, is not totally bad and corrupt in his Heart’ (486). For Fielding, as well as for Richardson, the world provides innumerable opportunities for error, and to act on its stage is inevitably to participate in its fallenness. In Book X, chapter ii, Fielding thus comments upon the need for the reader to exercise judgment in evaluating those ‘mixed’ characters that are his peculiar focus: In the next Place [writes Fielding], we must admonish thee, my worthy Friend … not to condemn a Character as a bad one, because it is not perfectly a good one. If thou dost delight in these Models of Perfection, there are Books enow written to gratify thy Taste; but as we have not, in the Course of our Conversation, ever happened to meet with any such Person, we have not chosen to introduce any such here … Nor do I, indeed, conceive the good Purposes served by inserting Characters of such angelic Perfection, or such diabolical Depravity, in any Work of Invention: Since from contemplating either, the Mind of Man is more likely to be overwhelmed with Sorrow and Shame, than to draw any good Uses from such Patterns; for in the former Instance he may be both concerned and ashamed to see a Pattern of Excellence, in his Nature, which he may reasonably despair of ever arriving at; and in contemplating the latter, he may be no less affected with those uneasy Sensations, at seeing the Nature, of which he is a Partaker, degraded into so odious and detestable a Creature. (526–7)

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In embracing a view of man as composed of virtue and vice, and applying this dictum to his art as a novelist, Fielding not only insists on the inapplicability (even insidiousness) of ‘Models of Perfection … or … Depravity’ (526–7), arguing that the unattainability (or odiousness) of such patterns gives rise to despair, but also maintains that imperfections in a character’s nature raise compassion and encourage moral reflection in a way that more uniform characters do not: In Fact, if there be enough of Goodness in a Character to engage the Admiration and Affection of a well-disposed Mind, though there should appear some of those little Blemishes, quas humana parum cavit natura, they will raise our Compassion rather than our Abhorrence. Indeed, nothing can be of more moral Use than the Imperfections which are seen in Examples of this Kind; since such form a Kind of Surprize, more apt to affect and dwell upon our Minds, than the Faults of very vicious and wicked Persons. The Foibles and Vices of Men in whom there is great Mixture of Good, become more glaring Objects, from the Virtues which contrast them, and shew their Deformity; and when we find such Vices attended with their evil Consequence to our favourite Characters, we are not only taught to shun them for our own Sake, but to hate them for the Mischiefs they have already brought on those we love. (527)

Allworthy’s early judgments of Tom are accordingly based on a recognition that men, and young men in particular, are composed of an amalgamation of merits and faults. In his defence of Tom in the affair of Molly, and much later, at the novel’s close, Allworthy reiterates this view of Fielding’s hero as predominantly good: ‘I know,’ he explains to Sophia, ‘he hath been guilty of Faults; but there is great Goodness of Heart at the Bottom’ (954). In the latter half of Tom Jones, Mrs Miller becomes Tom’s most impassioned advocate, praising his gentleness and sweet temper (879) and insisting on what strikes the reader in fact as a vibrant combination of traits in our hero: ‘I do not pretend to say [she avows to the sceptical Allworthy] the young Man is without Faults; but they are all the Faults of Wildness and of Youth; Faults which he may, nay which I am certain he will relinquish, and if he should not, they are vastly over-ballanced by one of the most humane tender honest Hearts that ever Man was blessed with’ (878). Her instinctive knowledge that Tom is not guilty of the unprovoked murder of Fitzpatrick is based on a conviction about Tom’s essential nature that cannot be dislodged by casual circumstance. And that nature, as she takes repeated pains to point out to Allworthy, is good. Indeed, Tom is ‘beloved,’ to use Mrs Miller’s adjective (879), in part because

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he errs, because his essential goodness is thrown into relief by his own faults and follies. As Tom, especially in the London episodes, moves uneasily between a Jekyll and Hyde existence, attending upon the vampiric Lady Bellaston in the evenings and succouring the Millers and Endersons during the day, Fielding exposes the venal life of the city (casting Tom as victim of the predatory world of fashion) and celebrates the simpler, more vulnerable world of the middle class (in which Tom presides heroically over the less enfranchised Nancy and the Endersons). Because ‘Mercy’ rather than ‘strict Justice’ (729) is an attitude of judgment that is encouraged throughout Tom Jones, the reader is repeatedly challenged to exercise acts of assessment that are complex rather than simple, that take into consideration context and motive (as in the cases of Mr Enderson and Black George) rather than the letter of the law. The lapses and ‘variousness’ of Tom’s character are demonstrated not only as his two ‘lives’ (la vie de Bellaston and that of Enderson/Nightingale) converge increasingly on Mrs Miller’s rooms but also as Fielding shuttles restlessly between Lady Bellaston’s house and the abode of the Millers. If Tom eventually comes to practice the beneficence of his uncle Allworthy (who is, in Tom’s words, ‘sent upon Earth as [the] Pattern [of heavenly Benevolence and] … divine Goodness’ [410]), the fact that he both inherits and ‘humanizes’ Allworthy’s goodness is repeatedly invoked in the Mrs Miller sections of the novel. As Mrs Miller cries when Tom offers to relieve the Endersons, ‘Good Heavens! Is there such a Man in the World?’ (721). (This ejaculation is followed by an explicit conjunction of Tom and Allworthy.) The point is less, perhaps, that Fielding needs to create proponents for Tom at this juncture in the novel, with the affair with Lady Bellaston at its height, than that he is encouraging the reader to see Tom as an ‘Angel from Heaven’ (727) despite his faults, ‘the worthiest, bravest, noblest of all human Beings’ (Enderson’s nomination, 727). Indeed, Tom is, in the family of the Millers, repeatedly an ‘Angel,’ Mrs Miller’s ‘good Angel, the Preserver of her poor little Family’ (778). Mrs Miller’s attentiveness to and love for Tom have the effect of his absorbing some of her goodness and selflessness. The earlier encomia on Fielding’s hero – ‘all human Perfections assembled together’ (287), as Sophia eagerly puts it to her aunt in the scene in which she inadvertently reveals her love for Tom: ‘So brave, and yet so gentle; so witty, yet so inoffensive; so humane, so civil, so genteel, so handsome!’ (288) – ‘the most handsomest, charmingest, finest, tallest, properest Man in the World,’ according to Mrs Honour (292) – are resurrected towards the novel’s end, not only through Tom’s most fervent spokesperson, Mrs Miller, but also through such unlikely (and ephemeral) characters as Arabella Hunt (who speaks of ‘such Proofs of [Tom’s] Virtue and Goodness, as convince me you are not only the

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most agreeable, but the most worthy of Men’ [827]). As Mrs Miller pleads Tom’s case before Sophia, she calls him ‘the best natured Creature that ever was born’ (896), ‘so kind, so good, so generous a young Man, and sure he is the best and worthiest of all Human Beings’ (896). Mrs Waters and even the philosopher Square attest emphatically to Tom’s goodness. ‘No young Gentleman of his Age,’ Mrs Waters solemnly assures Allworthy, ‘is, I believe, freer from Vice, and few have the twentieth Part of his Virtues’ (946). Square’s testimonial of Tom’s character, in view of the solemnity of his deathbed confession, carries the weight of an absolute judgment. ‘Believe me, my Friend,’ he writes to Allworthy in the section that forms the ‘main Purpose of [his] Letter,’ ‘this young Man hath the noblest Generosity of Heart, the most perfect Capacity for Friendship, the highest Integrity, and indeed every Virtue which can enoble a Man’ (927). At the end of the novel, reunited with his ‘Angel,’ Tom gains the ultimate reward of his goodness, and the couple is depicted in the happy, hyperbolic terms the reader has come to associate with Fielding’s pair: Tom is ‘one of the finest Figures ever beheld’ and Sophia ‘the finest Creature in the World’ (970). Tom here achieves his ultimate ascension: he is ‘the happiest of Men’ (975), ‘the happiest of all human Kind’ (979). ‘To conclude,’ writes Fielding, ‘… there are not to be found a worthier Man and Woman, than this fond Couple, [nor one] more happy’ (981). The rhetorical balancing at the end of Fielding’s novel suggests the confidence and extraordinary pleasure Fielding has in the conjunction of these two human beings. Fielding’s style in Tom Jones, like Swift’s in Gulliver’s Travels, heightens the reader’s awareness of its author’s preoccupation with the often discordant relationship of real and ideal. Unlike in Gulliver’s Travels, however, in which the real (the bodily, the actual) effectively explodes and discredits the ideal (as in the Swiftian list), Fielding brings the two realms into contact in a more genuinely comic and cautionary way, encouraging the reader to be realistic about the degree to which ideals can be upheld in a world that is devoted to material and personal gain. Thus, in the description of Allworthy’s morning walk, in which ‘Nature’ and ‘Fortune’ are sonorously balanced,24 Fielding inflates his rhetoric both to magnify our sense of Allworthy’s benevolence and to warn us about maintaining such lofty expectations about his characters. Reader [he cautions at the description’s close (a description said in the chapter heading to bring the ‘Reader’s Neck … into Danger’ [42])], Take care, I have unadvisedly led thee to the Top of as high a Hill as Mr. Allworthy’s, and how to get thee down without breaking thy Neck, I do not well know. However, let us e’en venture to slide down together, for Miss Bridget rings her Bell, and Mr. Allworthy

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is summoned to Breakfast, where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your Company. (43–4)

Such a rhetorical passage ‘endangers’ not because the air is too rarefied in the realms of the ideal but because a busier, and in many ways more complex, ‘fallen,’ and interesting world constantly beckons or exhorts one downward. The ‘slid[ing] down’ (44) that is required for Fielding’s narration to move forward (in this instance, the infant Tom must be produced before Bridget) engages a set of characters and motives that is more convoluted and a world that is viewed with considerably more irony on Fielding’s part, tests the penetration of the reader, and produces opportunities for humour that are absent from the more exalted passages. The ‘descents’ therein enacted recur repeatedly in Tom Jones, rhetorically (as here, as also in the description of Sophia, and in the exchanges between Tom and Partridge) as well as literally (as, for example, when, after an inflated description of the dawn and sentimental reflections on his love of Sophia, Tom runs (‘or rather [slides]’) down Mazard Hill to rescue the earthly Mrs Waters (495) (see Oakleaf). Tom’s precipitate involvement with Mrs Waters embroils him, significantly, in the very world of sexual predation and graft that the Man of the Hill has repudiated; the gusto with which Fielding reassumes the narrative from the tedious and sententious misanthrope suggests the degree to which he embraces (because his narrative powers are more fully engaged in) the ‘real’ world in which characters with principles and aspirations, such as Tom, must test those tenets – even if or for the reason that such a world does not take such ideals seriously (Mrs Waters) or has repudiated ideals altogether (Lady Bellaston). It is in the dynamics of such collisions (the shifting points of view, the irony) that Fielding’s peculiar narrative and rhetorical energy manifests itself. In Tom Jones such dynamics are often, in accordance with Fielding’s principle of contrast, thrown into relief by the storytelling or sermonizing of characters (such as the Man of the Hill, or Allworthy in his lectures on love and charity) who, for whatever reasons, have no ironic perspective on themselves and do not tolerate or notice the interruptions or revisions forced by an acceptance of alternate views. Thus, Partridge, bored by the Man of the Hill’s story and eager to open some level upon which he can engage in the narrative, repeatedly interrupts and interpolates his own inane and rambling accounts in order to point the importance, rhetorically, of setting different perspectives at interesting odds with each other. Fielding’s desideratum – a constellation of viewpoints – reinforces his ideological conviction, most overtly presented in the episode of the Man of the Hill, that a self-sustained system (the simile of the polished bowl) is not only unrealistic in its pretended disengagement from

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the human community but also undesirable or limiting. (The Man is anachronistic and bitter.) Though Allworthy is in many senses the obverse of the Man of the Hill, adhering to concepts of love and charity that the Man has pronounced absent from the world of humankind, his viewpoint and his stature in many ways give rise (at least narratively) to some of the same problems as those of the disillusioned hermit: Fielding allows his lectures to go on at extended length and represents his auditors as cynically amused (as Dr Blifil in Allworthy’s ‘Sermon’ on love [70–2]) or (in retrospect, at least) inattentive (Jenny Jones, during the discourse on chastity [51–5]). Such ‘mono-vocal’ (Loftis 16–17) occasions, during which competing views are discouraged and action comes to a halt, may be moments at which Fielding is reinforcing important theoretical matters (as in the discussion of Captain Blifil and Allworthy on charity), but the same points are inevitably made more saliently when they are enacted, as in the episode of the bird, or the meeting of Tom, Partridge, and Mr Enderson on the road.25 Fielding’s preoccupation with judgment and with comedic acts of deconstruction (his predilection for mock-epic moments and style, for juxtaposing ideal and real in dynamic and humorous ways) suggests not the darkness of a decentred world (that despair from which the Man of the Hill [and Richardson’s Clarissa] recovers by an adoption of an ‘otherworldly’ creed) nor the absolute inapplicability of ideal standards in a fallen world (as is the case for Swift), but an ethos and method that are sustained by comic commerce between the two. Fielding recognizes not only that the prerogatives of the body will often override the more exalted aspirations of the mind or spirit, but also that such ‘sliding down’ is often a corrective to unrealistic visions of continence or chastity. Thus, Tom’s meditations on Sophia after Allworthy’s recovery, fuelled and heightened as they are by the wine he has drunk in his joy at the news of Allworthy’s health, are significantly interrupted and obliterated by the intrusion of Molly. Abstractions, conventional clichés of thwarted love, and unrealistic projections of his constancy (‘O Sophia … Curst be that Fortune … The chastest Constancy will I ever preserve to thy Image’ [256]) are exploded by the transformation of the ‘Circassian Maid’ (256) into the excremental, animal Molly, who shortly succeeds in seducing Tom into a Grove from which the nightingales have assuredly departed. Fielding pretends to relate this accident with ‘Sorrow’ (‘and with Sorrow, doubtless, [it] will … be read’ [255]),26 and claims that he is obliged to do so from ‘that historic Truth to which we profess so inviolable an Attachment’ (255). The point is an important one: Fielding’s apologetic allegiance to the ‘actual,’ his refutation of that ideal premise that hypothetically dictates human action, cautions the reader not so much against the temptations of the flesh as against the perils of over-idealizing. The fact

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that the episode (at least that part in which Tom is most in jeopardy) is concluded by a ‘tender Caress’ (265) at the stream does little in any event to suggest that Tom’s alliance with Molly threatens in any serious way his standing with Sophia, nor that it is regarded by Fielding as anything more than youthful hijinks. It also, as in the novel’s final scene, locates Tom’s affection for Sophia not in the realm of platonic love or romantic rhetoric (‘my Goddess; as such I will always worship and adore her’ [208]) but in the body as well (though this mutual attraction appears for the time being to be deflected onto Tom’s liaison with Molly). The deflation of romantic language or ideals is a recurrent rhetorical event in Tom Jones, part of the process of debunking that reminds Fielding’s readers that their place and focus are in the real world. Partridge assumes this position in relation to Tom, (over)correcting his tendency towards the high drama of the heart. ‘Those Lovers,’ Tom comments to Partridge on his relation of a story from the Spectator, ‘must have had Souls truly capable of feeling all the Tenderness of the sublimest of all human Passions.’ ‘Very probably,’ cries Partridge, ‘but I envy them more if they had Bodies incapable of feeling cold; for I am almost frozen to Death’ (436). Though Fielding clearly does not expect the reader to subscribe to Partridge’s prosaic view, he here mocks both Tom and Partridge: Tom for being rhapsodically idealistic, Partridge for being unromantically banal. The idea is, clearly, to mediate between these two extremes, or to engage them both, as in the end do Tom and Sophia. The bathetic effects created by Fielding’s deflation of lofty rhetoric (‘the feather’d Creation had betaken themselves to their Rest. Now the highest Order of Mortals were sitting down to their Dinners, and the lowest Order to their Suppers. In a Word, the Clock struck five’ [435]) – signalled by phrases such as ‘to speak plainly’ (517), ‘in plain English’ (528), ‘in simple Phrase’ (609) – suggest not only Fielding’s fascination with the juxtaposition and apparent irreconcilability of points of view, but also the tendency (as in Swift) of ‘low’ to collapse ‘high’ as well as the habit of ‘high’ to function as a veneer for what is entirely ordinary (or even, as in the case of Lady Bellaston, vulgar). Indeed, Fielding’s mock-heroic style serves repeatedly to effect the comic collision of high and low, a rhetorical strategy that suggests that, although the possibilities for an epic encounter may have disappeared, there is recompense to be had in the humour of applying elevated language and criteria to a ‘low’ situation (as in the battle in the churchyard). The exercise is a high form of intellectual game, intended to appeal to a learned audience familiar with Virgil and Homer, at the expense of a constituency composed of those lower orders whose fears and desires are in the course of being enacted. But Tom Jones is, after all, a comedy, and when Tom Freckle is knocked down with his own patten, the reader

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is expected not to wince at Tom Freckle’s pain but to laugh at the allusion to Phereclus. In such situations the characters per se dissolve and become part of a fabric of intellectual allusions meant to evoke a comic response. When, in the episode of Molly and Square, Fielding compares Molly’s room (‘or rather Garret’) with ‘the great Delta of the Greeks’ (229), such a comparison belittles Molly’s situation (it is, after all, her poverty and the lowness of her birth that compel her to occupy a garret), but social facts concern Fielding little at this juncture in part because he is much more interested in exposing Molly and Square’s hypocrisy in his project to release Tom from an engagement that might threaten both the plot and the tone of his own novel. The comedy (both of the specific analogy and of the ‘accident’ as a whole) is thus, on a certain level, created at Molly’s expense. When Fielding, later in Tom Jones, considers these issues seriously in the episodes of the Enderson and Miller families, his tone is not ironic but (sometimes turgidly) sentimental. Comedy and insight are also generated by Fielding’s pleasure in constellating viewpoints that radiate from a single event or situation (narrative commentary or commentary by the novel’s characters and its social equivalent, gossip, inevitably serving this function), and the episode of the bird is exemplary in this respect. As A.R. Humphreys has observed, ‘Swift tends relentlessly and unremittingly in one calculated direction; Fielding leaps from posture to posture. Swift has the inner and outer consistency of unruffled logic; Fielding the brilliant manifold brandishings of cut-and-parry debate – one never detects him in the same stance two sentences running’ (186). The portrait of Bridget (35–6), accordingly, plays a number of actual and assumed perspectives against each other to create a ‘thick’ description that alerts us to her complexity. In a clarification like ‘the Poor, i.e. to those who had rather beg than work’ (38), the comedy positions an (assumed) sanctified perspective against a cynical one, the latter back-read27 over the former, resulting in a response that is initially aesthetic rather than ethical (though it raises an ethical question). Back-reading on a grander scale is, of course, required in the portrayal of Bridget, in the episode at Upton, and, overtly, by the narrator, in Allworthy’s speech to Tom on the occasion of Molly’s arrest (193) (the latter suggesting that Allworthy’s failings may stem from a sense of justice that is less sensitive to specific situations than it should be). Such flatness of perspective is also the problem with monologues that invite and entertain no ‘alternative’ response from their auditors.28 Example Allworthy’s speech on love to Jenny Jones, which, though inherently laudable, appears to be ironized by the setting in which it is delivered: Jenny Jones is innocent, Bridget and Deborah are eavesdropping. As in the novel’s mock-heroic moments, the dicta are potentially threatened by the context from which they arise. An ability to respond sensitively to one’s surroundings is

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crucial in Tom Jones, the negative epitome being the chameleonesque qualities of Fielding’s maidservants, as Deborah Wilkins, ‘tacking about’ in accordance with the unexpected comments of her mistress. (Deborah is called a ‘truly great Politician’ [57].) Fielding’s style, made dynamic by the continual shifts in point of view and instrumental in achieving that tone of irony for which he is celebrated, gains a fullness through an accretive, appetitive force, not, as in Crusoe or in Swift, through a grim, horizontal listing of attributes or items, but by a pausing and multiplication of registers and contexts (as in the episode of the ‘Circassian Maid,’ as it is further enriched by references to venery and LeBrun). The picaresque mode of Fielding’s novel contributes to this sense of extent, to the ‘spaciousness’ and ‘rambling discursiveness’ of his work.29 Fielding’s mastery of the voices of epic, theatre, periodical essay, and romance,30 added to his cheerful insistence on the right to plunder the classical writers (619–21), results in a reading experience as well as a range of allusiveness that broadens and elevates and intellectualizes his novelistic world beyond that of Defoe, joining the ludic freedom of the intellect with the behests of the body. Indeed, for Fielding, both heroes and readers appear to possess bodies that are as demanding as their minds, so that reading and eating, writing and the preparation and consumption of victuals, ‘tasting,’ ‘spicing’ – mental and culinary entertainment tout court – are shown from the initial chapter of Tom Jones to involve energies that are strikingly the same. The extended simile that informs Book I, chapter i, in which Fielding likens his work to a feast and his readers to partakers of the dinner that he has purveyed, engages not only issues of commerce (Fielding’s readers, because they have paid for Tom Jones, having a right to register objections to it, and even cease reading it altogether), but also those of appetite, the emphasis being, unlike in Swift, on intake and enjoyment (relish). The result, Fielding hopes, is that the reader ‘may be rendered desirous to read on for ever, as [Heliogabalus] is supposed to have made some Persons eat’ (34). Thus, and in truth, Fielding’s work is a ‘Feast,’ both socially (as is suggested in the stagecoach analogy at the novel’s end) and nutritionally, and our bodies demand rest between chapters (150–1, 474, 460) so that we may recruit our strength and read on. Our bodily rhythms and needs thus, interestingly, as Richard Cumberland remarked, are vividly imagined and catered to in this most hospitable of novels: [A good] novel-writer … will [not keep his reader’s attention too long upon the stretch but will] contrive to make some breaks and pauses in his narrative, which may give relief to the ear, and some degree of relaxation to the mind. This seems generally understood by the novel-writer, who, by the distribution of his matter

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into books and chapters, tenders to the reader in his several stages so many inns or baiting-places by the way, where he hangs out a sign that there is rest at least to be had for the weary traveler. An eminent author [Fielding], whose talent for novel-writing was unequalled … furnished his baiting-places with such ingenious hospitality, as not only to supply his guests with the necessary remissions from fatigue, but also to recruit them with viands of a very nutritive as well as palatable quality. According to this figure of speech … he was not only a pleasant facetious companion by the way, but acted the part of an admirable host at every one of the inns. Alas! it was famous travelling in his days: I remember him full well, and despair of ever meeting his like again, upon that road at least. (96–7)

Tom Jones is a novel of exuberant energy, of rich enjoyment. Bagehot’s comparison of Fielding and Thackeray stresses Fielding’s deep and vigorous pleasure in writing: ‘Fielding was a reckless enjoyer. He saw the world, – wealth and glory, the best dinner and the worst dinner, the gilded salon and the low sponging-house, – and he saw that they were good. Down every line of his characteristic writings there runs this elemental energy of keen delight. There is no trace of such a thing in Thackeray’ (310). Fielding writes in a style and with an attitude of generosity – unlike Defoe – in which spending and expanding and consuming with gusto suggest his allegiance (as is the case with Smollett) to a plethora of bodily and intellectual experiences. That such experiences (and learning) must be accomplished through an active engagement with the real world is seen repeatedly in Fielding’s novel, not only in his dicta (for example, ‘A true Knowledge of the World is gained only by Conversation, and the Manners of every Rank must be seen in order to be known’ [742]),31 but also in the rich historicity of his work, which has become the focus of much recent criticism on Tom Jones. As Hazlitt wrote of Tom Jones, it ‘smacked of the world I lived in’ (‘Essay XX’ 222). Unlike Richardson, who, in Burns’s words, draws ‘beings of some other world’ (letter 437 [to Dr John Moore], 28 February 1791, 2: 74), Fielding emphasizes the ‘local and national’ (Pye 309). Indeed, Fielding’s work is permeated with references to contemporary figures and events, from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6 to persons such as Charlotte Cradock, Mrs Whitefield, and Mr King. Gossip situates actions firmly in a social context that bears relentlessly on deeds. There is no act that does not ripple repercussively through a series of social networks and perspectives. For Fielding, unlike Richardson, such dissemination tends to be revisionary and broadening. Hence the suspicion of the misanthropic or solitary, ‘enlightened’ view – the Crusoesque Man of the Hill, the Quaker.32

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In Book XIII, chapter xi, returning in confusion from a play, Sophia goes to a glass to perceive Tom standing like a statue behind her. The moment is an interesting one, a precursor to the famous mirror scene at the novel’s end, which will bring ideal and real together in an emblematic sign of cohesion and closure. Sophia’s gesture is so instinctively natural as to require no analysis on the reader’s part. But here, a potential moment of inwardness refracts, or doubles, into a social one that is more compelling and suspenseful, the very opposite of Lovelace’s centrifugal posing in the pier-glass. Sophia and Tom are brought unexpectedly together, with Sophia trailing the infatuated love-debris of Lord Fellamar (which will complicate her situation later in the novel) and Tom, betraying by his very presence his involvement with Lady Bellaston. (A similar flight from inwardness is described during Tom and Partridge’s attendance at the play Hamlet.) All actions take place in and accrue meaning because of a social context; reflection, tellingly, multiplies, complicates, and makes richer one’s ties to others, ties that are both ethical and physical (as the resolution of this and the later mirror passage suggests). Such dramatic moments are clearly the obverse of the Man of the Hill’s bitter and solitary meditations on the Mount, for they foreshadow and finally underline the celebratory and forgiving temper that attaches humans to each other in a world in which the ideal (Sophia) is found to have a ‘real’ manifestation that provides more true pleasure and opportunity for benevolence and love than any rarefied principle or idea.

5 A Simple Story: Dissipation

Friction. Resistance to sliding, a property of the interface between two solid bodies in contact. Many everyday activities like walking or gripping objects are carried out through friction, and most people have experienced the problems that arise when there is too little friction and conditions are slippery. However, friction is a serious nuisance in devices that move continuously, like electric motors or railroad trains, since it constitutes a dissipation of energy, and a considerable proportion of all the energy generated by humans is wasted in this way. Most of this energy loss appears as heat, while a small proportion induces loss of material from the sliding surfaces, and this eventually leads to further waste, namely, to the wearing out of the whole mechanism. McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology (1960)

Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story is, like Clarissa, concerned with ways in which incomplete knowledge of the self may result in assertions of power that are combative and destructive to the tensions that lend dignity and fineness to social intercourse. Like Richardson, Inchbald casts this issue in predominantly political terms, with particular emphasis on relations of gender and patriarchal rule, pitting women against men in battles of will and of authority. Her concerns about the body are manifested in deeply divided attitudes towards energy and theatricality, towards the ‘activated’ embodied self, which occupies her in profound ways in this vivid novel. Inchbald’s characters are intensely embodied: as is the case with many sentimental heroes and heroines, they exhibit muscular evidence of a turbulence within. Inchbald is both drawn aesthetically to such bodily depictions of sensibility and morally sceptical of their impact upon a larger social order. The corporealization of desire in A Simple Story, in effect – as it did in Clarissa and as it will do in Frankenstein – poses funda-

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mental threats to human liberty, to the contracts that bind persons in productive and mutual enterprises. Because the idea of liberty is, in the world of the eighteenth-century novel, fundamentally tied to issues of authority and obedience, Inchbald is equally concerned with the relationship of embodiment to social enfranchisement (especially of women). Whether A Simple Story bears testimony to female freedom or proclaims its futility, however, is a point on which critics of the novel remain divided. Terry Castle has argued in favour of its libertarian tone. ‘A Simple Story,’ she writes, ‘is a restlessly anti-authoritarian, even avant-garde work. It insistently satirizes conventionality, self-restriction, physical and psychic inhibition – the morbid state, in Freudian terms, of civilization itself’ (Masquerade 292). Castle has written compellingly on Miss Milner’s – and Matilda’s – thrilling ‘trespasses’ (Masquerade 296) into the realm of patriarchal rule. ‘Whether by accident or design,’ she observes, in discussing physical and social proscriptions in Inchbald’s novel, ‘the heroine always goes where she is not supposed to. But the violation of masculine law results, not in the expected separation, but in the collapse, the voiding, of proscription itself … The result is utopian … a realm of ideal freedom’ (Masquerade 295). Patricia Meyer Spacks takes issue with Castle’s reading of Inchbald’s tale as a ‘rhapsody of transgression in which masculine authority is … demystified’ (Castle, Masquerade 293), arguing that Inchbald not only punishes Miss Milner for her assertiveness but also creates Matilda as her corrective anti-type, as a character who sets to rights the disruption of her mother’s actions, and restores the novel and its cast of characters to conventional social order.1 The relationship between Inchbald’s two heroines and the two parts of her story (the question of whether the tender, melancholy Matilda continues her mother’s campaign for self-expression and self-fulfilment, or whether she concedes defeat in her reversion to accepted codes of feminine behaviour) has been a subject of debate since Wollstonecraft reviewed the novel in 1791.2 The question is exacerbated by the unusual composition history of the piece. A Simple Story may have evolved from a combination of two – or even three – separate novels begun as many as fourteen years apart, with the volumes containing Matilda’s history grafted onto an earlier self-contained tale (see Boaden 1: 75, 264; Sigl 224). Significant differences in tone, characterization, and narrative style mark the two halves of Inchbald’s work. Whereas the first part of the novel, as Castle has cleverly argued, is ‘French’ in manner (Masquerade 300–1),3 the second is more English in presentation. A bold and exciting heroine gives way to one that is paler, more self-effacing, and more ‘feminine,’ and the narrative shifts from an erotic, transgressive focus to a more conventional (sentimental, or even Gothic)4 configuration. The larger issues that the two parts of the novel treat, however, are strikingly

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similar. Both focus closely on tensions between liberty and restraint, on female desire, and on expectations of feminine behaviour within a predominantly male realm, and both are strongly Oedipal in tone. In deliberately aligning Matilda’s situation at the midsection of the novel and that of her mother at the beginning of the tale, Inchbald intimates that her two stories of female education are strongly related.5 Indeed, Castle views Matilda’s career as a kind of phantasmic copy of her mother’s, a repetition that reveals Inchbald in the grip of an ‘emotional [or, perhaps, ideological] idée fixe, the obsessive pattern of proscription/violation/ reward’ (Masquerade 323). Matilda’s history – her yearning for and eventual union with her father – ‘replays’ in its crudest outlines the story of her mother, and the seemingly inaccessible Dorriforth is again the object of woman’s desire. This time, however, through the assistance of conventions of romance, and, arguably, because she relinquishes the prerogative for self-assertion on which her mother insisted, the heroine achieves a happiness that is not adulterated by punishment or death. But if Matilda ‘rewrites’ her mother’s story, providing it, as it were, with a different ending, she also – like Cathy in her relationship with Hareton – bowdlerizes it, purging it of that tautness and energy that marked the first two volumes of Inchbald’s tale and for which Inchbald was celebrated by contemporary readers.6 The shift in tone as one moves into Matilda’s narrative is unsettling, resembling almost a change in surface tension.7 Though Castle sees in it a ‘privatization’ (or domestication) of those issues of desire that energize the first half of Inchbald’s tale, asserting that Inchbald’s campaign for liberty and fulfilment here simply goes ‘underground’ (325–6), the reader senses an attitude of apology – even fatigue – that compromises the apparently radical political and physical program of the first half of the work. When Matilda, as a chastened (or ‘muted’)8 copy of Miss Milner, achieves reunion with her father through a career of suffering, passivity, and self-abnegation, we experience, perhaps, not so much a rebuttal of the moral, political, and psychological questions raised by Miss Milner as a refusal deeply and honestly to confront them – a withdrawal, even a betrayal, as Wollstonecraft suggested in her review of Inchbald’s work, of those issues into conventional expressions of sensibility.9 In atoning, as Matilda seems to do, for her mother’s sins of self-expression, the more pressing questions of their motive and source, and of the imperative of personal and moral freedom that underlies the ‘political’ struggle between Miss Milner and Dorriforth, are complicated yet further. In a certain sense, they are simply abandoned. The part of the narrative that links Miss Milner’s and Matilda’s stories, and in which the relationship between these two characters and their careers ought to be made clear, is marked by a change in authorial voice that both highlights the reader’s sense

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of disjunction and deprives him of the grounds (hitherto dramatic) by which to judge Miss Milner’s actions at the end. An unseemly moralizing air (‘Throughout life …’),10 untypical addresses to ‘the reflective reader’ (183), and summaries of character and motive simplified to the point of inaccuracy11 amplify the sense of unease as Inchbald moves into the novel’s second half. Inchbald’s tone of breathless reportage at the opening of Volume III hints at the real problem of the ligature (as Castle calls it, 321): her unbusinesslike haste to dispatch Miss Milner, as if the questions of expression she poses are finally too insurmountable to deal with. Miss Milner’s ‘fall’ (the uncharacteristic term is Inchbald’s, 184) is summarily related in three paragraphs, a paradigm, Inchbald sonorously suggests of this heretofore most unparadigmatic heroine, of ‘the progression by which vice gains a predominance in the heart’ (184). Pronounced guilty (185), by her own creator, of the ‘degradation’ of adultery (the term is Sandford’s, 189), Miss Milner is branded with moral indictments that come from a realm outside the novel – one that feels an urgent need to pass judgment and move on. The ensuing chapter begins to thaw the characters from this immobilizing rhetoric, as Inchbald presents the reader with a striking (but as yet unanimated) tableau of the novel’s principal characters: Lady Elmwood lies upon her deathbed, will-less and ‘pale, half suffocated with the loss of breath’ (188), surrounded by Miss Woodley, Lady Matilda, and Sandford. The scene and its labels restate some important questions about Inchbald’s view of Miss Milner, some of which are explicitly raised by Inchbald and some of which are buried, it seems, under the press of summary and clarity. Shuttling between language that appears to buy into the conventional condemnation of the adulterer (‘sinner,’ ‘vice,’ ‘crimes,’ ‘fall,’ ‘guilt’) and dramatic representations of Miss Milner’s situation that call sympathetic attention to her loneliness and alienation as well as to her contrition, Inchbald in the end evades the challenge of Miss Milner by reverting to the language and perspective of the law and sentimentalism, and then allowing Matilda to step in and resolve the questions of self-assertion she has posed on entirely different grounds. Whether Miss Milner’s fall is designed to raise or to put an end to questions about her energy (and about the dynamics of relationships in which wilful women engage) remains a vexing issue of the novel. Adultery, in effect, puts a final, criminal gloss on Miss Milner’s actions, marking as reprehensible her vanity, her lack of self-command, her inability ‘to resist temptations, whether to reprehensible, or to laudable actions’ (35), her tendency to seek elsewhere to fill a ‘vacanc[y]’ (185) in her heart. Whether or not we fault Lord Elmwood in whole or in part for his wife’s fall, it is clear that in not respecting his wife’s judgment enough to reveal to her the true reason for his prolonged absence, Lord Elmwood inspires suspicion and resentment in his mate.12

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If Inchbald seems both uncertain as to where to place the blame for Miss Milner’s tragic end and reluctant to follow to any explicit conclusion the psychological issues that she has raised, she is less hesitant about her concerns about female education. With Miss Milner’s fall, Inchbald is able to underscore her notion that women’s education fails them in the most fundamental way. In enforcing the idea that female importance has to do solely with sexual conquest (16) and in unfitting her for both adversity and retirement (in which domains her daughter will be schooled [207]),13 Lady Elmwood’s education has not stood her in good stead. Trained to display herself as a sexual object in ‘the gayest circles’ (185), and deprived of the love and stewardship of a husband,14 it is only logical that Lady Elmwood’s postmarital assertions of self will be by nature adulterous and that she will succumb to temptation. Whether Miss Milner has ‘fallen’ because of her ‘improper education’ (318), through the inadvertent errors of her husband, or whether, more problematically, her adultery represents the culmination of her career of self-expression, branding it, summarily, as self-destructive and erosive to the social fabric, the relationship of female expression to freedom seems to be constituted negatively. Lady Elmwood’s last words come, with difficulty, as she notes (198), from the mouth of a ‘corpse’ (the shocking term is Sandford’s, 196), and in her letter to her husband – designed explicitly to be read by him only after she is in the grave – she construes herself as will-less, projecting her wishes, as if by ventriloquism, through her father, withholding herself from any direct contact with Lord Elmwood. Indeed, at this juncture, her desires can be achieved only by as complete a self-erasure as she can manage. The moral issues of Miss Milner’s end are similarly unresolved. Are we meant to label Miss Milner, as Sandford (sadly) does, a ‘sinner’ (or, as Inchbald more haughtily calls her, ‘guilty’) and get on with Matilda’s story? Or does her contrition encourage us to modify this view? Why are we denied an enactment of her penitence, or, for that matter, the sin that prompts the irreversible charge of adulteress? What is her sin? Is Miss Milner’s emotional suffering such insufficient penance for her error that she can only ‘hope’ (189) for mercy? Must the balance be passed on to her daughter for payment? Who, as Swinburne argues, can rightly expiate for another (90–2)? Is private penance not enough? Is penance sufficient only when it reclaims another (in this case, Lord Elmwood)? There is nothing, we are led to feel, inherently ‘wrong’ with Miss Milner’s desire for recognition and liberty. She is a character who sparkles with vitality and wit, and she descends upon the staid household of Dorriforth like an electrical charge, making the atmosphere bristle with the passionate energy of her actions and her desires. In the first section of the novel she has the reader’s sympathy, despite her follies, and she appears, temporarily at least, to have

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achieved her goals. She is ‘seen’ (and heard), and she manages thereby, as Castle observes (298), to exert a debilitating influence on the stolid realm of male rule. Neither Miss Woodley’s somewhat parasitic nature, nor Miss Fenton’s torpor, nor Mrs Horton’s passive-aggressive energy provides a satisfactory alternative ‘answer’ to the problem of female behaviour in a world moved by men. But Miss Milner’s insistent clamouring for attention – she ‘desires,’ in Gonda’s words, ‘a stage for display’ (182)15 – and her corrosive effect on the architecture of authority in A Simple Story, betray a profoundly dangerous16 side to her desire for self-enfranchisement. Deprived of dignity and a true knowledge of the self, Inchbald’s heroine is (perhaps for this very reason) in a position to cause such damage to the system that constrains her that the consequences of her libertarian quest are bound to recoil upon the self and others in injurious ways. Thus, though the repeated disintegration of contractual relations, the ‘voiding … of proscription,’ in Castle’s words (Masquerade 295), that mark Miss Milner’s trail in A Simple Story may suggest, headily, the possibility of freedom (because constraints are repeatedly dissolved), it in fact makes freedom impossible because it has rendered the ideas of contract and commitment laughable. Second, by the terms of her definition of liberty (violation of restraint, sovereignty over another),17 she can never achieve autonomy because her definition of self depends, paradoxically, upon the presence (indeed, the resilience) of the system she seeks to destroy. Miss Milner’s preference for ‘tak[ing] libert[ies]’ (36) to taking liberty itself is a telling distinction. She wishes to ‘irritate’ (144) and defy the system; she wishes to flirt with the possibility of its breakdown. But the consequences of the system ‘taking her at her word’ are seen in her banishment at the beginning of Volume III. As a social or otherwise humanly connected being, to court a breakdown (or inversion) of authority is, if one is taken seriously, equivalent to courting punishment and exile. As the Jewish proverb puts it (and this could apply, interestingly, both to Miss Milner’s marriage to Lord Elmwood and to her exile), ‘Be careful or you’ll get what you want.’ Here, Inchbald seems to be saying, lack of constraint is antithetical to a state of true freedom. Given the human tendency to think hierarchically and contractually, an absence of structure is not only frightening but also destructive to one’s sense of self (though an oversubscription to patterns of dominance and submission can exert the same effect, as the self-estranged Lord Elmwood testifies in the second half of the novel). And the large work of a formation of a sense of self must be done in private, through steady and peaceful exercises of the will. Most perversely, political and personal freedom appears incompatible: Miss Milner can identify (indeed, effect) the structural signs of loosening bondage (silence, release, reversals of constraint), but with it (because her definition of self depends upon the stabil-

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ity of the very system she seeks to unfix) she erodes her sense of self. In such a situation, which guarantees not only personal but also aesthetic failure, the exercise of power automatically leads to its loss.18 Matilda appears to right or at least overturn the destructive career of her mother: her passivity leads to fulfilment of her desires. But the price she pays – if measured by the standards erected in the first half of the novel – is immense: her view set rearwards, towards reunion with a father (not a husband), towards rectification of moral and emotional wrongs committed by her mother, Matilda is set in motion by a plot already played out by her progenitors. Confined by Lord Elmwood’s vows as much as she is captive in his house, she initiates no decisions about her own fate. The energy of her situation lies in the past – not allowing it even the dignity to pass, to be over, Matilda walks a gauntlet constructed by her mother’s and father’s hubris, living a kind of life by proxy in which any direct contact or assertion of the will threatens her with annihilation.19 Lord Elmwood’s willingness to place his daughter in this situation is, strangely, his only claim to sympathy throughout most of Volumes III and IV, as it testifies to his commitment to (the dead) Miss Milner, but Inchbald’s own neglect of the wrongs he commits against (the living) Matilda sends a confusing signal about her views of the dignity and autonomy of the individual. As Haggerty puts it, ‘the act of [Lord Elmwood] folding his brutally rejected daughter [to his breast] seems to assume that no explanation of his past behavior is necessary’ (50).20 The careers of both Matilda and her mother point in the end to the futility of the desire for intense personal attachment – not only because of the threat it poses to the social order, but also because the balancing of individual freedom and fineness in the context of an emotional (and especially a sexual) relationship seems an impossible feat for humans to accomplish. Miss Milner fails at it because she confuses liberty with rebellion and evasion; Dorriforth fails because he has no language of the heart, no successful way of expressing his emotional needs or of balancing them with his ethical rigour;21 Matilda fails because she willingly and morbidly serves as a proxy for her mother. Such failures have their roots in a view of imaginative expression that Inchbald presents in the first volumes of A Simple Story. It is a view that, despite its aesthetic and political appeal, is so deeply subversive to the social and moral order that she atones for it in the second half of the novel, retreating in haste and terror from its implications, suggesting in the end a conception of the imagination that, like Mary Shelley’s, is at odds with the achievement of personal happiness and social stability. Early in the novel, pressed in the presence of Sandford and Miss Woodley to disclose her intentions regarding Lord Frederick Lawnly, Miss Milner assumes an air of levity that calls into question the very premise of what she

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has been asked. The dynamics of this scene reveal how crucial to Miss Milner’s self-expression is an atmosphere of propriety and how unenfranchising is the relationship between Inchbald’s principal characters. As Dorriforth summons his rhetorical and emotional strength to impress upon Miss Milner the need for clarity, his ward responds in a way that seems calculated to change concern to tyranny, entreaties to commands. The very ‘ceremony’ (55) of the question Dorriforth poses (which at once tests Miss Milner’s commitment to his rule as well as her attachment to another, a deep and manifold revelation of the self) is mocked by Miss Milner’s insistence on her prerogatives of privacy and whim. Her responses to Dorriforth’s ‘serious oration’ (55) raise critical questions about the kind of freedom Miss Milner desires: ‘Stay now,’ cried Dorriforth. ‘And Miss Milner,’ continued he, ‘I not only entreat, but command you to tell me. – Have you given your promises, your word, or your affections to Lord Frederick Lawnly?’ The colour spread over her face, and she replied – ’I thought confessions were only permitted in secrecy; however, as I am not a member of your church, I submit to the persecution of a heretic, and answer – Lord Frederick has neither my word, my promise, nor any share in my affections.’ Sandford, Dorriforth, and Miss Woodley all looked at each other with a surprise that was for some time dumb. – At length Dorriforth said, ‘And is it your firm intention never to become his wife?’ To which she answered – ‘At present it is.’ ‘At present! do you suspect you shall change your sentiments?’ ‘Women, sometimes do.’ ‘But before that change can take place, madam, your acquaintance will be broken off: for it is that, I shall next insist upon; and to which you can have no objection.’ She replied, ‘I had rather it would continue.’ ‘On what account?’ cried Dorriforth. ‘Because it entertains me.’ (56–7)

In this scene, the claims of propriety and pleasure jostle for dominance, as do those of duty and self-indulgence, the adherence to a socially sanctioned course of action and an unwillingness to be restricted to a conventional behavioural code. Miss Milner’s studied refusal to commit herself in any serious way to Lord Frederick hints at her involvement in a more radical cause: she appears to be defying not only convention but also the ideal of fidelity itself, wresting herself free from a system that constrains her to act and feel in a certain programmatic way. In so doing she becomes, at least in theory, a catalyst for change, through the ‘calculated production of uncertainty’ (Phillips xvii)

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opening a space for creative alternatives to conformity. But are Miss Milner’s goals in fact so lofty? Her response may also be a knee-jerk reaction to a forced disclosure, resentment at being asked to bare herself in public about questions of the heart. (The inquiry about her affections elicits a blush; she calls the ‘interrogation’ persecutory, implicitly chiding Dorriforth for extorting a confession – something of a private, even sacred, nature – in front of others.) Yet Miss Milner, as in her earlier provocation of Sandford, in which she alludes to his intrusive and unmanly character, achieves her greatest coup in this scene by virtue of its being public: she dumbfounds her audience with her negative answer about Lord Frederick (with an added twist deriving from the fact that her stagiest confession is in fact the truest). As the scene shifts in this way from confession to theatrical display, the nature of Miss Milner’s intent becomes all the less clear. On one level, the kind of ‘determination’ that Dorriforth seeks (52) in this exchange is antithetical to Miss Milner’s nature. She personifies (explicitly here) change; her nature, epitomized in the episode of the masquerade, is fluid, transformative; she embodies the personal and the ephemeral. Her exercises of self-expression take place, however, against a very different backdrop: a world of austerity, ‘steadfast principles’ (76), rigour, and self-control. These are the defining attributes of Dorriforth’s world and, juxtaposed as they are against the values of his ward, they necessarily rise up to arraign her. The world that confines Miss Milner is clearly a man’s world – or, rather, it is a nostalgic version of that world – and Miss Milner’s urge to cast off its shackles is patently a feminist one (‘Women, sometimes do’), an attempt to define herself by ‘other’ (or by no) rules. But if Miss Milner wishes, in her flirtatious refusal to tie herself to a certain course of action, to postpone decision, to keep the momentum of possibility open through teasing and irreverence, she fails, in the end, to ‘make a space’ to do so, in large part because she herself is not happy, when all is said and done, with the kind of liberty she pretends to seek. Miss Milner does not, in fact, desire freedom at all, but combat, strategic warfare with those systems of authority that, ironically, have become the only means by which she (negatively) defines herself. Miss Milner’s response to Sandford and Dorriforth’s insistence that she put Lord Frederick’s dismission in writing – ‘Dictate what you please, Mr Dorriforth, and I will write it’ (58) – does not, thus, importantly, concede the battle, though it is partly a statement of obedience; ‘inclination’ is not the same as ‘obedience’ in this instance, but is more like a coincidence of desire. More deeply and subversively, it baffles her audience in its deep evasiveness to commit the self to writing, to expression. Miss Milner will, apparently, willingly serve as scribe to Dorriforth’s directions (‘I will write it’) but it is clear that what will be written will be, as we say now, by dictation (with a subtle reference to Dor-

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riforth’s pleasing [?] tyranny) (‘Dictate what you please … and I will write it’). Miss Milner’s inclination to write by dictation frustrates authority because it is on the most profound level a refusal to write (by) herself. It only flirtatiously implies compliance, while it more disruptively evades true obedience (a state constituted by consonance of wills, not the subsuming of one by another), withholding the self from self-scrutiny and the scrutiny of others. Throughout A Simple Story, even in the last two volumes, which she ‘haunts’ (Gonda 191) and covertly directs,22 Miss Milner exerts a force of disruption over the largely staid world that she inhabits. She rivets the attention of the reader, as she does of nearly every character around her, by the energy of her desires and her movements. That energy is distinguished not by its power to do, to achieve, but by an adversarial inclination to unsettle; to disrupt; to exhibit and to create ‘commotions’ (38), social, psychological, and moral. Her actions, in their systematic (and irritating) ineffectuality, resemble those of Milton’s Satan and his Stygian colleagues, who aim not so much to ‘accomplish’ or ‘do,’ but to ‘disturb’ (Paradise Lost II, 102), ‘Alarm’ (II, 103), and ‘pry’ (I, 655). Such forays, though they can never topple the prevailing system of authority, may achieve injurious inroads against it, and Miss Milner’s likeness to Satan (alluded to by the censorious Sandford [113]) resides not only in her ‘eruptive’ energy (Paradise Lost I, 656), but also in her relative weakness, her failure to garner a source of power and a self that are truly autonomous. Miss Milner resembles in this regard a kind of feminized, boarding-school-educated Satan, set loose in a much more doleful and continent Garden of Eden. In keeping with Miss Milner’s lack of ‘keeping,’ the adjectives and titles assigned to her point systematically to her ‘incongruity’ (75), the capriciousness of her emotions and behaviour. In her youth she provokes wildly differing reports on her character (10–13). She is ‘inconsistent’ (70, 85), ‘volatile and captious’ (103); she has an ‘impatient, irritable disposition’ (185). Her behaviour in regard to Lord Frederick is described by Lord Elmwood as ‘incoherent, undefinable, unaccountable!’ (122). Part of this incoherence stems from her deceit: she veers from apparent affection for to apparent disinterest towards Lord Frederick in order to conceal her love for her guardian. But, on a certain level, to Inchbald, it is precisely Miss Milner’s ‘unaccountability’ (in the deepest sense of that term [122]) that is her charm: her coquettishness, her ‘caprice’ (87), her frivolity, and her indiscretions pose a thrilling and dangerous challenge to the patriarchal order that increasingly marshals its forces to constrain her. Operative in Miss Milner’s volatility and captiousness is a view of forceful imaginative expression that is at base deeply adversarial. Miss Milner, indulged from infancy, is described early in the novel as a rebel to all systems and conventions of constraint: she ‘habitually started at the unpleasant voice

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of control’ (16) and remonstrates ‘at being limited in delights her birth and fortune entitled her to enjoy’ (20). Her beauty prompts her to devote herself to conquest, her quick sensibility to resentment and repartee. Confusing freedom and license, love and conquest, her sensibility discovers itself antithetically, as it were, in ‘resentment[s] of injury or neglect’ (16). Her energy is thus not active but reactive, not constructive but destructive. Indeed, Miss Milner is happiest (or, at least, most at ease) in the mode of combat. She thrives in battles of ridicule and wit; she enjoys behaving saucily and indecorously. Her ‘spirit of contradiction’ (39) has ample opportunity for expression during the period in which she serves as Dorriforth’s ward. Even her manifestations of obedience, as in the incident of the letter of dismissal discussed above, are engaged in for effect, to mortify and ‘vex [her] enemies’ (45–6). ‘Raillery,’ thus, not unsurprisingly, is her usual strain. Such a discursive preference is telling: witty, it masks the needs of the heart; at once fashionable and aggressive, a form of verbal contest that society tacitly licenses, it frees Miss Milner to challenge (as she could, decorously, in no other situation) the prevailing social order, without exposing her own allegiances (if any). Raillery allows the railer to evade such commitments by training attention on conversational strategies rather than substance. Inchbald’s interest in such tactics may be seen in a conversation in which Miss Milner and Miss Woodley receive the compliments of Miss Fenton (recently revealed to be Dorriforth’s fiancée): ‘How does poor Miss Fenton look?’ Mrs Horton asked Lord Elmwood. To which question Sandford replied, ‘Beautiful – she looks beautifully.’ ‘She has got over her uneasiness, I suppose then?’ said Mrs Horton – not knowing she was asking the question before her new lover. ‘Uneasy!’ replied Sandford, ‘uneasy at any trial this world can send? that had been highly unworthy of her.’ ‘But sometimes women do fret at such things,’ replied Mrs Horton innocently. Lord Elmwood asked Miss Milner – ‘If she meant to ride, this charming day?’ While she was hesitating – ‘There are very different kinds of women,’ (answered Sandford, directing his discourse to Mrs Horton,) ‘there is as much difference between some women, as between good and evil spirits.’ Lord Elmwood asked Miss Milner again – if she took an airing? She replied, ‘No.’ ‘And beauty,’ continued Sandford, ‘when endowed upon spirits that are evil, is a mark of their greater, their more extreme wickedness. – Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels in paradise –’ ‘How do you know?’ said Miss Milner. (113)

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Miss Milner tests authority here on a number of levels. Not only does she indecorously (indeed, rudely) interrupt the elder Sandford, but she also quickly trains the attention of the speakers on herself, though in this strangely constellated talk, in which Sandford is covertly directing his remarks to Miss Milner, and in which the reader’s eye is caught by the more interesting exchange between Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood about Miss Milner’s projected airing in the park, Miss Milner has in fact been from the beginning of the discussion its true subject, and the two men prove it by finally contending for dominance as this becomes more apparent. Indeed, it is clear that Miss Milner is the repeated topic of all the book’s colloquies, and that she exercises a dissolving force upon any expressions of decorum or mutuality, conversational or otherwise. Raillery, in fact, depends, Milneristically, upon the assumption of centre stage by a discussant who can shift the focus of a conversation in progress not only by interruption or disruption but also by emptying it of any substance it might have had, and without any placing of the self on the line, as it were.23 Miss Milner’s insistence on verbally challenging, retorting, ‘disquiet[ing]’ (70), and ‘irritat[ing]’ (185) is transgressive on many levels: not simply because it makes social discourse impossible (how can one properly converse with someone whose stake in a conversation is to undermine it?), but because her actions call into question, in a way that is patently dangerous, systems of belief and language that are traditionally associated with any sense of mutuality. Miss Milner’s activities in this regard are explicitly antisocial, for they direct attention to the self and its right to pursue its own hedonistic desires whatever the cost to others. Her laughter in this regard (in all its Hobbesian overtones) is not the genial laughter of community but the triumphant expression of exclusion and autonomy. It is telling that her debut in the house of Dorriforth is concluded by a laugh (at Mrs Horton’s genuflection) that effectively empties the room of all souls but Miss Woodley (18). Mrs Horton’s piety, serving as it does as a screen for her condemnation of Miss Milner, deserves censure here – but an overprizing of the self (‘vanity,’ pride, vain-glory, self-approbation, as Inchbald relates sonorously, ‘an inordinate desire of admiration, and an immoderate enjoyment of the art of pleasing, for her own individual happiness, and not for the happiness of others’ [21]) and an inability to govern it may lead, Inchbald’s scene seems to suggest, to rejection and alienation. Miss Milner’s love of strife and strategy is not restricted to conversational arenas, but typifies her attitude to issues of the heart. Thus, Miss Milner no sooner secures Dorriforth’s affections than she feels impelled to test them, to transform the thing gotten to something challengingly out of reach. Her bellicose nature in this incarnation betrays a sharper – and far less attractive – edge. She soars in opposition to Dorriforth’s will after the revelation of his

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love, boasting of her invincibility (131) and gloating over the transformation of Dorriforth from anchorite to ‘the veriest slave of love’ (132). Her vocabulary and attitude towards her lover resemble those of a despot more than those of an affectionate companion: Lost in the maze of happiness which surrounded her, Miss Milner oftentimes asked her heart, and her heart whispered like a flatterer, ‘Yes,’ ‘Are not my charms even more invincible than I ever believed them to be? Dorriforth, the grave, the sanctified, the anchorite Dorriforth, by their force is animated to all the ardour of the most impassioned lover – while the proud priest, the austere guardian, is humbled, if I but frown, into the veriest slave of love.’ (131–2)

Miss Milner speaks not of love but of ‘power,’ of ‘triumph’ (132, 133, 144), and ‘yield[ing]’ (140). There is a hint of sadism in her pride, a need to experience power in exclusive, punitive, and tyrannical ways, as well as strong evidence of narcissism in the probationary course she devises (in theory) for her fiancé: ‘I wonder,’ she muses, ‘whether [his affection] would exist under ill treatment? if it would not, he still does not love me as I wish to be loved’ (132). Troubling here is not only the emasculatory urge of Miss Milner (what she means by ‘ill treatment’ is not entirely clear, and even less clear is what it would mean to be loved by one who sustains ill treatment and why she would find that satisfying) but also her desire to steer Dorriforth onto a path that would be profoundly compromising to his morals. She urges a similar program after the news of Dorriforth’s threat to break their engagement: she will ‘put him to the proof … [by doing] something that any prudent man ought not to forgive; and yet … I will force him still to yield to his love’ (140). The picture of Dorriforth doing what he thinks wrong appears especially pleasing to her and she exhibits no sympathetic sense of the pain such dilemmas must cost him. ‘She was charmed,’ Inchbald writes, ‘to see his love struggling with his censure’ (133). Indeed, Dorriforth seems to be used as a high chip in an erotic gambling game that Miss Milner is determined to win. Miss Milner here, like the Wife of Bath, appears to be struggling for domination, not love, as the narrator explicitly says (142).24 But these struggles do not seem so much ‘delicate’ (as the narrator calls them) as insidious and deeply dangerous. Imperative here is Miss Milner’s need not only to be on top but also to demand as proof of love a breakdown of Dorriforth’s personal and moral values. Her role (what she will do) seems not even to be considered. Constructive discussion of a mutual kind is demeaned to refusals to ‘obey’ (145), to ‘submit’ (145): setting him ‘at defiance’ (144), being insolent at opposition (132) are her program. She does not seem to notice that such a design is radically dependent on his opposition.

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How she manages the questions of love and loving in her own mind is elided in the quest ‘to be loved’ in a certain way and at a certain cost (to Dorriforth). In directing all of her emotional energies outside the self, in an attempt to control or unhinge Dorriforth, it is no wonder that he pulls back into the mode of guardian: and, in response, Miss Milner appears to act more flippantly and irresponsibly than before her engagement. (Her airy purchases at the auction are a case in point [138].) In a certain horrible sense, it is precisely this adversarial relationship that Miss Milner courts. Simultaneously needing validation of her self from the ‘outside’ and goading the system to stop her as she repeatedly ups the ante in the battle of wills – endless, because the self can never be adequately validated from the outside (especially if such validation contains a hint of submission by the other) – it finally calls her bluff and her career of self-expression comes to an end. The kind of ‘love’ Miss Milner desires can – and should – never be satisfied. Whether the house of Dorriforth has invited – or requires on some level – this sort of discomposure is not entirely clear. The abode of Mrs Horton resembles a kind of Paradise of Bachelors, with the priest Dorriforth occupying an unofficial position of authority as head of the house and the two ‘unseductive … females’ (8), Mrs Horton and Miss Woodley, ministering reverently to his needs. And Dorriforth appears to merit such a position: he is associated not only with friendliness and liberality but also with ‘rigour,’ solemnity, and coherence: ‘every virtue which it was his vocation to preach, it was his care to practise … he dwelt, in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance’ (5). Mr Milner considers him a paragon of human nature (5). The sonorous abstractions with which Dorriforth is linked call attention to his moral probity and solidity; his intimate relation with vows (the ‘solemn vows of his order’ [5], his promise to fulfil ‘all [the] injunctions’ of the dying Mr Milner [7]) pronounces him a being with profound social and ethical connections to others. Miss Milner seems designed to test the sober certitude of Dorriforth’s world. She introduces love into a household of celibates (a priest, a spinster, and a widow), luxury into a house of ‘careful plainness’ (8), immoderate and unwarranted desires into a place of ‘moderation’ (8), fiscal waste into a system of ‘economy’ (8), youth into a house of age. More profoundly, she disrupts her guardian’s composure, even before her arrival, producing ‘cares, doubts, [and] fears [in Dorriforth’s] mind’ (9), reducing him, in the grip of something deeper than a desire for information, to ferreting out clues about her from casual acquaintances (10). The reports he receives, significantly, are directly in conflict: Lady Evans dismisses Mr Milner’s daughter as ‘idle, indiscreet, [and] giddy’ (10), while Mrs Hillgrave holds forth with great emotion on the ‘beauties of

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her disposition’ (13). Such discussions of Miss Milner produce anxiety on the part of Dorriforth (10, 12), eliciting a surprising series of sentimental responses – blushes, sighs, starts, and tears. He appears for some reason to be touched to the heart. Inchbald here seems to be foretelling and relishing the eventual ‘breakdown’ of Dorriforth. Despite his connection to a world of abstract principles (‘prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance’ [5]), she dwells on what is clearly its anti-portrait: the ‘gleam of sensibility’ that diffuses itself over his features and that marks him (like his pathological priest-double, Ambrosio) as a man of feeling: ‘on his countenance you beheld the feelings of his heart – saw all its inmost workings – the quick pulses that beat with hope and fear, or the placid ones that were stationary with patient resignation’ (10).25 The transparency and sensibility of his countenance belie, in effect, his ‘professional’ stolidness, and his peculiar earnestness and anxiety in connection with Miss Milner, his blushes and uneasiness, hint broadly at a buried erotic attraction to his ward or at least a propensity to love. That such a proclivity in itself is unsettling is typically (for Inchbald) physicalized in his uneasy rising, starting, and turning round throughout the brief conversations with his two informants. Inchbald’s attitude towards this trait of Dorriforth’s is strangely coy: presenting clear clues about his amorous interest in the eighteen-year old Miss Milner, such manifestations of desire (‘he turned pale – something like a foreboding of disaster trembled at his heart, and … darted over all his face’; his heart is ‘agitat[ed]’ when he is introduced to her [14–15]) are interpreted by him as omens of ill, and he is made to seem like a man who is being drawn against his will into an arena of feeling with which he is little acquainted, as he demonstrates when he engages her the following day in an awkward dialogue that smacks more of the drawing room than of the vestry (17–18), and in which Miss Milner clearly has the advantage: ‘You have a greater resemblance of your father, Miss Milner, than I imagined you had from report: I did not expect to find you so like him.’ ‘Nor did I, Mr Dorriforth, expect to find you any thing like what you are.’ ‘No? – pray, madam, what did you expect to find me?’ ‘I expected to find you an elderly man, and a plain man.’ This was spoken in an artless manner, but in a tone which obviously declared she thought her guardian both young and handsome. – He replied, but not without some little embarrassment, ‘A plain man you shall find me in all my actions.’ She returned, ‘Then your actions are to contradict your looks.’ … On this he ventured to pay her a compliment in return. ‘You, Miss Milner, I should suppose, must be a very bad judge of what is plain, and what is not.’

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‘How so, sir?’ ‘Because I am sure you will readily own you do not think yourself handsome; and allowing that, you instantly want judgment.’ ‘And I would rather want judgment than beauty,’ she replied, ‘and so I give up the one for the other.’ With a serious face, as if proposing a most serious question, Dorriforth continued, ‘And you really believe you are not handsome?’ ‘I should from my own opinion believe so, but in some respects I am like you Roman Catholics; I don’t believe from my own understanding, but from what other people tell me.’ (17–18)

That on some level Inchbald enjoys this discomposure of Dorriforth is clear. Though he is not afflicted with the hauteur of Lewis’s monk Ambrosio, and thus does not absolutely require a cutting down to size, he is in need of constructive humanization (as is seen in his autocratic treatment of his sister and the child Rushbrook). His apparent belief that he can lead his life solely as a man of reason will be to any novel reader of the period implicitly suspect, and his attempts to remain studiedly insensitive to his own erotic desires put the reader in a position of relative superiority as he knowingly interprets Dorriforth’s anxiety, abruptness, trembling, eagerness, uneasiness, warmth, agitation, and fervency as signs of his attraction to the charming Miss Milner. When he receives the news of Miss Milner’s love, the ‘fire’ and ‘vehemence’ of his eye mark the apex of his power and self-knowledge – he steps forward as the man of passion, alarming the kindly Miss Woodley with the immoderateness of his love (125). If the art of the flirt is the art of unfulfilment, the dark work of withholding and teasing prolongation, it is that art that Inchbald confusingly both celebrates and deplores in her heroine. Neither mutually confirmed passion nor marital bliss appears to be a congenial topic for her. Indeed, the moment Dorriforth confirms his love for Miss Milner, Inchbald shifts her attention to other concerns; the description of Lord and Lady Elmwood’s spousal happiness takes the space of a brief and laconic dependent clause: ‘Lord Elmwood, after four years passed in the most perfect enjoyment of happiness, the marriage state could give … was then under the indispensable necessity of leaving them both for a time’ (184). The union of Matilda and Rushbrook similarly quells narrative momentum, bringing the novel to a halt on a queerly hypothetical and disinterested note: ‘Whether the heart of Matilda, such as it has been described, could sentence him to misery, the reader is left to surmise – and if he supposes that it did not, he has every reason to suppose their wedded life was a life of happiness’ (318). What occupies Inchbald’s imagination and ignites her crea-

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tive energy are erotic desire and play, and that play is cruel, as it devolves upon struggles for power that appear to have no place in any sphere of tender love. Dorriforth’s moral world at the opening of Inchbald’s novel is solid; it is firm; but it lacks energy. On some level, Inchbald feels, it must be ‘irritated’ (144), ‘roused,’ called into question, and she celebrates, as does Lewis, the ‘softening’ of the man of principle into the man of love. In her description of Lord Elmwood’s hardened character after the adultery of his wife, she elegiacally lauds such a process, associating love with the more positive energies of magic, enchantment, and transgression: His lordship was a man who made but few resolutions – those were the effect of deliberation; and as he was not the least capricious or inconstant in his temper, they were resolutions which no probable event could shake. – Love, that produces wonders, that seduces and subdues the most determined and rigid spirits, had in two instances overcome the inflexibility of Lord Elmwood; he married Lady Elmwood contrary to his determination, because he loved; and for the sake of this beloved object, he had, contrary to his resolution, taken under his immediate care young Rushbrook; but the magic which once enchanted away this spirit of immutability was no more – Lady Elmwood was no more, and the charm was broken. (234–5)

It is curious that those very traits that exalt Dorriforth – his firmness, his principles – are also those that, magnified, make him inhuman. Unchecked (or unenchanted) by the magic of Miss Milner, Dorriforth’s firmness hardens into inexorability, the ‘purest’ male principle, as the female’s, presumably, is caprice. His is a kind of stubbornness that keeps one out of the human system, whether ‘above’ or ‘below’ it, and Inchbald’s attitude towards this quality of character is complex. There is clearly something about Dorriforth’s gravity and rigour that, in exalting him, in making him a paragon of human nature, attracts, for better or for worse, a destructive attention, both from Inchbald and from her heroine Miss Milner. Against Dorriforth’s patriarchal authority and injunctions are pitted Miss Milner’s intractability and defiance, her restless refusal to be categorized, ‘settled’ (ward or lover, man or woman). Against Dorriforth’s consonance (his features bespeak his heart) is Miss Milner’s posture of masking and deceit, the ‘intricate incoherence’ (77) of her character and actions; against her guardian’s world of stability her world of uncertainty and change: ‘Do you call that [that she contradicted what she said yesterday] miraculous? … The miracle had been if she had not done so – for did she not yesterday, contradict what she acknowledged the day before? – and will she not to-morrow, disavow what she says to-day?’ (83).

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Part of Inchbald’s theme here is clearly the familiar one of female mutability: women’s charm lies precisely, as Pope had also declared in ‘Epistle to a Lady,’ in their contrariety. Miss Milner dazzles with the energy of self-contradiction and changeableness, leaving her men (Dorriforth, Sandford) gasping or mute at her abrupt changes of mind and disposition. She has ‘spirit’ (41), and, unlike the torpid Miss Fenton, with whom she is explicitly contrasted, that spirit ‘proceeds.’26 Her levity and frivolity (132, 134), her ‘follies’ (132) are at once a mark of her humanness (Miss Fenton is inhumanly sedate) and a sign of her transgressive and disruptive nature; her inconsistencies of behaviour border, as Miss Woodley once notes, on derangement and madness (70–1). It is said explicitly by Inchbald, and ratified later by both Sandford and Lord Elmwood, that Miss Milner is ‘dangerous’ (16, 43, 179). She is dangerous on a number of levels. Her spirit and her energy are dangerous because they threaten to undermine a patriarchal system based on stability and covenants. They are dangerous because, in prizing gestures over language, they privilege the body (and the libido) over the mind; and because deceit necessarily accompanies transgression, they challenge the principle of linguistic integrity that is the bulwark of any contractual agreement among human beings. These are portentous threats to the system arising from a simple desire for self-pleasuring, and though on one level Inchbald feels that the current system of authority needs to be shaken (largely, perhaps, to ‘know itself’ better, as is the case with Dorriforth, who, like Ambrosio, responds readily and almost instinctively to Miss Milner’s siren call to love), the result of such ‘irritation’ is not change (at least not in the first half of the novel) but a kind of exaggerated stalemate in which the two sides become almost parodically polarized as any system of mutuality collapses around them. Miss Milner’s indiscretions do not thus, in the end, aim so much to make opportunities for creative change as to train attention in an almost frantic way upon the self, to vaunt individual wants over the needs of any social collective in a world in which hedonism (service of the self, and of the body) rules out any possibility for mutuality except the unhappy mutuality of contention.27 Thus, even on the evening of Lord Elmwood’s departure, when it is assumed that Miss Milner is in the deepest despair, Inchbald’s heroine instinctively assumes a posture of retaliation, declining to breakfast with Lord Elmwood because he has taken leave of her without speaking. Sandford’s rejoinder – ‘Why did not you speak to him? … pray did you bid him farewell? – and I don’t see why one is not as much to be blamed, in that respect, as the other’ (172) – points to the childishness of such pride. But Miss Milner cannot give in, because contention, having become the sole proof that she has a will, has become indispensable to her sense of self. The risks to the self, and to the body politic, under this system of self-realization are devastating: not only

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does Miss Milner retributively deny herself, but, as she works her ‘magic,’ the world of contractual obligations also collapses into one of reneging, renegotiating, and casuistry. The result is not, as Castle maintains, a utopia of perfect freedom (Masquerade 295) but one of perfect chaos: invisibly restrained from happiness by a logic that requires a constant escalation of combat, a constant validation of the self in the resistance of the other, the ‘dangerous’ Miss Milner hurtles to her own doom, bringing down with her much that is good and firm in society besides. Inchbald’s repeated attention to contracts and vows is a distinctive trait of A Simple Story. Charges, covenants, and formal (even documented) expressions of the will make the storyline, casting over the narrative, as Ian Balfour has noted, a deterministic atmosphere that in itself militates against the possibility of rightful change (239–44).28 (To a degree, as Peter Hynes observes, such an ambience also characterizes Clarissa, with Clarissa’s father’s curse contributing to constrict Clarissa’s sense of agency and the reader’s hope for a positive evolution of her story [312–20].) To seize freedom in such a context is by definition to be transgressive, to be a breaker – advertent or inadvertent – of promises, and Inchbald’s story moves forward precisely by means of such transgressions. The novel comes into being as the result of a promise: Dorriforth agrees to take charge of Miss Milner in compliance with his friend’s injunctions. The early relationship between guardian and ward similarly devolves upon contracts: it is structured by Dorriforth’s careful and anxious decisions on how and when to mete out prohibitions to his refractory ward. The latter half of the novel unfolds as a result of Lord Elmwood’s explicit and formal resolution never to acknowledge the offspring of his wife. Within these outlines, pledges (usually negative or monitory ones) are repeatedly made and, like the oath that lends the last half of the story its architecture, broken. Inchbald’s anxious attention to commands (promises exacted from others) and vows (promises made to the self) points to her deep interest not only in issues of truth and justice (as Balfour discusses, 243–4) but also in those of commitment. Dorriforth occupies the centre of this discourse on contract. His connection to the world of vows is implicit in his station. He is, as she points out in the first sentence of her novel, an ordained priest by ‘the solemn vows of his order’ (5), sworn to celibacy by ‘a religious vow’ (8). He is a man, furthermore, who values and cultivates injunctions and promises (7) and respects the mutual obligations conferred by friendship: he readily, if anxiously, assumes the guardianship of Miss Milner at the request of his dying friend. Miss Milner appears initially to participate with good grace in this (homosocial) web of obligations, responding to the provisions of her father’s will ‘without the smallest reluctance’ (9) and preparing ‘with … silent acquiescence’ for

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her arrival in London (9). Her prostration at the moment of her introduction to Dorriforth confirms that their relationship is one in which the terms of authority and obedience are conventional and clear: Miss Milner kneels to her guardian and promises ‘ever to obey him as her father’ (15). But whether it is from giddiness of character (a lack of moral adhesion) or from her perception of Dorriforth from the first as something more than ‘father,’ Miss Milner demonstrates a repeated inability to adhere to the conditions (explicit and implicit) of that agreement. In her saucy responses to Dorriforth’s conversational efforts at breakfast, Miss Milner so violates the laws of decorum by which the household operates that she drives Mrs Horton and Dorriforth from the room. Her subsequent behaviour confirms her disregard for her guardian’s rule. Miss Milner oscillates recklessly between defiance and submission, keeping Dorriforth on a tightrope of anxiety over how best to ‘manage’ her. Dorriforth’s response to the instability of their relationship is to assume an increasingly authoritarian stance towards his ward: he issues a growing series of ‘warn[ings]’ (20) and entreaties that, unheeded, augment to resolutions, commands, and prohibitions (as in the case of his demand that Miss Milner spend the evening of the ball at home [31]). Dorriforth’s efforts to curb Miss Milner’s folly by exerting authority over her, however, repeatedly backfire, either goading Miss Milner to acts of disobedience or producing acts of obedience that so startle Dorriforth that he is moved to revoke his commands. Dorriforth’s confusion at Miss Milner’s compliance in the scene in which he orders her to stay at home on the night of the ball shows that he is not entirely comfortable taking on the authority of a (biological) father. When Miss Milner (perhaps not unartfully) acquiesces to his prohibition, he unexpectedly breaks his word by reversing his command: ‘Once more,’ he says to the tearful Miss Milner, ‘show your submission by obeying me a second time to-day. – Keep your appointment, and be assured I shall issue my commands with greater circumspection for the future, as I find how strictly they are complied with’ (34). Far from being a rhapsodic moment in which masculine prerogative gives way to female desire (as Castle maintains is the pattern throughout A Simple Story), this instance of revocation (which is, significantly, greeted with tears on the part of Miss Milner and a specious prediction of tractability on the part of Dorriforth) sounds an ominous note. Such a stance is, in fact, deeply erosive to our sense of authority in A Simple Story. Is Inchbald suggesting with Dorriforth’s retraction that his original command was issued frivolously, arbitrarily, or without due circumspection? Is it tyrannical that he should expect her to keep her word to him? If one has made competing promises (as is the case with Miss Milner), how ought one to rectify such a situation? Is Dorriforth implying, by praising Miss Milner’s strict compliance with his orders, that an

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injunction may be complied with less strictly? What would such a response look like? In this weird foreplay of the battle of wills that will constitute their relationship, the ground, as it were, dissolves and the two principals grapple for power for the mere sake of establishing dominance. Dorriforth, on Miss Milner’s obedience to his rule, appears instantly to give up the moral and political high ground, experiencing not pleasure but anxiety and shame at holding her to her word. That he should feel guilt, that he should ‘[feel] himself to blame’ (33) and be reduced to seek pardon (34) from Miss Milner (as he does: ‘Forgive the duty of my office,’ he complains, as he releases Miss Milner from his earlier command [34] and sends her off on her frivolous excursion), shows the degree to which the system of patriarchal authority bends under her energy. Miss Milner continues to overturn such decisions, getting Dorriforth to see, and later take in, the child Rushbrook, whom he had vowed never to acknowledge on account of his sister (35). Indeed, Miss Milner appears to infect the house with a kind of anarchic charge, which causes promises and vows to dissolve as if by magic. Thus, Sandford, though he has declared his intention ‘never to enter a house of Miss Milner’s’ (48), appears there to report the impending duel between Dorriforth and Lord Frederick (65). And that duel, meant to have been kept from public knowledge, was revealed to Sandford by Lord Elmwood, despite Lord Elmwood’s promise to Dorriforth that he would conceal the information (64). Though Miss Woodley ‘vow[s]’ to pity Miss Milner if she will reveal the secret of her inconsistent behaviour, she shrinks in ‘horror’ (71) from her declaration of love for Dorriforth. Though a promise is a ‘sacred’ act to Dorriforth (66), he questions Miss Woodley about the state of Miss Milner’s ‘inclinations’ with the full awareness that a discovery may constitute ‘a breach of confidence’ on her part. He urges such a revelation at great length (123), arguing that his position and principles ‘authorize’ (123) such a discovery. Formal vows are also systematically dissolved. Upon the death of Lord Elmwood, Dorriforth is released from his priest’s orders by the great Pontiff of Rome (99); he severs his engagement with Miss Fenton, then with Miss Milner; and, in Volume III effectively dissolves his marriage with his lady, apprising Sandford that only respect for Mr Milner prevented him from divorcing her (196). At the conclusion of the novel, he breaks his word never to acknowledge the Lady Matilda as his daughter. Inchbald’s attitude towards such dissolutions of contract is complex. On the one hand, as Ronald Paulson has argued, she sees in such disruptions of ‘magisterial power’ (the phrase is attributed to Sandford [39]) a breakdown of a rigid autocratic system that is (she feels on some level) the precursor to an exercise of personal freedom, an attitude of significant currency at the time,

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and one held dearly by the increasingly political circle of friends with whom Inchbald associated herself (among them, Godwin and Holcroft) (229). Clearly, it is ‘right’ that Lord Elmwood report the duel to Sandford, and that Sandford post in haste to Miss Milner’s house to dissuade Dorriforth from such an encounter. Miss Woodley should not, similarly, be bound to a vow of pity if her sense of what is morally right has been violated. Lord Elmwood’s break with Miss Fenton and the dissolution of the engagement and (later) marriage with Miss Milner are also defensible on emotional grounds. And Dorriforth’s transformation from a forbearing Father into an implacable tyrant, from a man of ‘steadfast principles’ (76) to one who pathologically lies in wait to levy blame (202) when his promises are broken, shows that to adhere to the word over the heart marks one as inhuman. His conduct towards his head gardener, a faithful servant, is a case in point (251–2). (Indeed, ‘principle’ here has become no more than barely suppressed rage.) Lord Elmwood’s cruel imperiousness after Miss Milner’s fall throws the biblical story in reverse, not only as if Eve’s sin did not implicate Adam, but also as if it unleashed not Christ but a kind of Satanic parody of an Old Testament God, haughty, implacable, and unappeasable.29 Demands for submission (in which both Lord and Lady Elmwood engage) are not seemly or proper, whether they are dictated by disappointed rage or by erotic play. Tyranny and hardness of heart (the labels are assigned to Dorriforth) are inexcusable in any domain (183). But equally demoralizing – and frightening – is a world in which contractual relationships do not hold. Thus, Dorriforth’s revocation of his demand that Miss Milner pass the evening at home has the effect of unstringing a system that holds Miss Milner in check – that tunes and in a strange way makes beautiful her energetic opposition to Dorriforth’s rule. Lord Elmwood’s sonorous release of himself from his engagement to Miss Milner has a similarly devastating effect: ‘I am no longer engaged to Miss Milner than she shall deserve I should,’ he informs Sandford. On his mentor’s question about who’s to decide such issues, he replies, ‘My own judgment shall be the judge’ (135). Leaving aside the fact that judgment is always in question in defining Miss Milner’s actions and intentions (along with the redundancy that hints, with a strange blend of sympathy and censure, at Lord Elmwood’s self-centredness), what kind of hubris produces such a statement? Either one is or one is not engaged to someone else. The terms of engagement are by definition (even by etymology) mutually understood. The idea of secret or competing contracts dissolves the very principle of the thing. Release from (any) engagement here is merely a thin disguise for another – more insidious – kind of tyranny – more insidious because the terms of obligation are not divulged but are imperiously withheld, subject to private and

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hence potentially idiosyncratic definition: ‘My own judgment shall be the judge.’ It is difficult to make valid claims for what is right in a world in which covenants have no force, and this is, perhaps, the obverse side to a world of autocracy. Thus, Miss Woodley (of all people!) argues recklessly – and fecklessly – for Miss Milner’s ‘right’ to Lord Elmwood’s love despite his engagement to Miss Fenton: ‘No engagement between mortals, was, in Miss Woodley’s opinion, binding like that entered into with heaven; and whatever vows Lord Elmwood had made to another, she justly supposed, no woman’s love for him equaled Miss Milner’s – it was prior to all others too, and that established a claim, at least to contend for success; and in a contention, what rival would not fall before her?’ (111; emphasis added). Miss Woodley’s logic – and Inchbald’s attitude towards it – demonstrate, complexly, both the need for a relaxation of rules and the moral and political chaos that such a project can unleash. Again, we have the provocative, dangerous prizing of individual opinion over the social contract: Lord Elmwood’s engagement with Miss Fenton ‘in Miss Woodley’s opinion’ was not sacredly binding like that entered into with heaven. (It is unnecessary to point out that that vow has already been dissolved, so what, in fact, this contrast means is unclear.) Miss Woodley’s justification of Miss Milner’s right to Lord Elmwood on the basis of intensity and priority of love is equally questionable. One of these criteria is a matter of personal judgment (she loves him more), the other of fact (she loved him first). There is something crudely quantifiable about such standards, and it is perhaps for this reason that resolution will be achieved only by contest. Indeed, as the world of contractual obligation collapses, individuals will ‘contend’ for what they want, whether those desires are legitimate or not – and the grounds for their legitimacy have become profoundly unclear. More unhappily, in the absence of rules, all must be contended and contested, and the effect is morally and psychically – even physically – exhausting. ‘Promises,’ as an interesting conversation among Miss Milner, Sandford, and Lord Elmwood suggests, seem to invite such destructive attention from others that it may be more desirable not to commit the self to a course of action at all: ‘Mr Sandford,’ said Miss Milner, ‘I am afraid I behaved very uncivilly to you last night; will you accept of an atonement?’ ‘No, madam,’ returned he, ‘I accept no expiation without amendment.’ ‘Well then,’ said she, smiling, ‘suppose I promise never to offend you again, what then?’ ‘Why then, you’ll break your promise,’ returned he, churlishly.

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Banter as one may with terms such as ‘atonement,’ ‘expiation,’ and ‘amendment,’ it is clear that a world in which such concepts have become meaningless is a world without sacredness, a world in which (nearly) anything goes, if one pushes it with enough force. Repeatedly in A Simple Story, Inchbald explores the tension between an allegiance to principle and man’s desire to engage in self-service, primarily for his own advancement. The same problem inheres in a discussion between Sandford and Miss Woodley, in which Sandford makes an elaborate – and entirely specious – case about the binding nature of a promise he did not give to Lord Elmwood. In this exchange Sandford outdoes his nemesis, Miss Milner, in breaking a promise he never made and then insisting that it be kept by the person to whom he has disclosed it. Only because it caters to his own pride, he exultantly and prematurely reveals to Miss Woodley that Lord Elmwood has threatened to break his engagement with Miss Milner. Realizing, upon her reaction, that this disclosure may result in him not gaining his own ends (that is, the punishment of Miss Milner), he begins to hedge on the grounds of an agreement he has not explicitly made with Lord Elmwood: ‘Nay,’ said Sandford, ‘Lord Elmwood has not yet passed his word, that he will never see her more – he has only threatened to say so – but I know enough of him to know, his threats are generally the same as the actions done.’ ‘You are very good,’ said Miss Woodley, ‘to acquaint me of this in time: I may now warn Miss Milner of it, and she may behave with more circumspection.’ ‘By no means,’ – cried Sandford, hastily, ‘What would you warn her for? – it will do her no good – besides,’ added he, ‘ I don’t know whether his lordship does not expect secrecy from me on this subject, and if he does – ’ ‘But, with all deference to your opinion,’ said Miss Woodley, (and with all deference did she speak) ‘don’t you think, Mr Sandford, that secrecy upon this occasion would be wicked? for consider the anguish it may cause my friend, and if by advising her we can save her from –’ She was going on. ‘You may call it wicked, madam, not to inform her of it,’ cried he, ‘but I call a breach of promise (if I did give my promise, which I don’t say I did) much more sinful.’ ‘I suppose you are right; sir,’ said Miss Woodley, with humility; ‘but if you have given your promise, I have not given mine, and therefore may divulge –’ ‘There now!’ cried Sandford, ‘there is how you judge of this matter. – You judge of things as they are in reality, not what they are by construction; the only way to judge of any thing. – If I did make a promise to Lord Elmwood – (which, I again say, I don’t know that I did) – the promise was, that I would not communicate the

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secret; meaning, not tell it to Miss Milner herself. – I have not; and therefore have kept my word – and in revealing it to you, I did it with a full persuasion you would conceal it; which confidence, on my part, binds you as much as the most solemn promise you could have given.’ ‘The fault will be mine, then, not yours, if it comes to the knowledge of Miss Milner?’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘Then, as it will be my fault, do not you, sir, be uneasy about it.’ – He was going to explain again, but Miss Milner entered, and put an end to the discourse. (137–8)

The principle of contract here has become utterly farcical. Unsettling are not only the ‘white lie’ of Sandford about his vow to Lord Elmwood, but also the myriad of questions the debate raises about contractual agreements. Is Sandford lying about the fact or merely construing that his exchange with Lord Elmwood was a confidential communication? Or has a ‘persuasion’ (or, more flimsily, an ‘expectation’ of secrecy) come to mean a promise, as Sandford equivocally suggests to Miss Woodley? That is, if one tells someone something in confidence that the person will conceal it, does that persuasion in and of itself bind the recipient of that report to secrecy, whatever his or her views on the matter? And did Lord Elmwood communicate his intentions about Miss Milner to Sandford ‘with a full persuasion [that he] would conceal it’? Should or should not such ‘persuasions’ be spelled out between the relevant parties? If they are not spelled out, what expectations are appropriate, and who is to make such decisions? Do promises bind others in a successive way (though such a notion is absurd if one is dealing with a promise of secrecy)?30 The system of promises and obligations upon which Miss Woodley and Sandford call here is in a sense ‘beyond’ contract. Miss Woodley’s eagerness to save her friend from separation from her betrothed is, to her, a ‘greater good’ than any promise Mr Sandford may have made to his former pupil. But in fact the emphasis here is less on an emotional imperative (neither here nor in the instance in which Miss Woodley disputes Miss Fenton’s claims to Lord Elmwood does Inchbald suggest that Miss Woodley is doing anything ‘wrong’ – quite the contrary) than on evading blame for what appears to be an inevitable breach of faith. Means and end here seem entirely at odds, as Sandford devises ways to escape blame and Miss Woodley carelessly, as she has done in the earlier discussion about Miss Fenton, bypasses any obligations established by covenants per se. It is perhaps because of the high instability of one’s word in the world in which Inchbald’s characters move, coupled with the pressures and changes of passion with which they are burdened, that the wedding ceremony (in which

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man and woman reciprocally and sacredly bind themselves to a relationship of exclusive love) is so charged with awe and dread. In this scene, the two lovers are hurried by a celibate – and unsympathetic – Sandford into a relationship, the contractual terms of which are explicitly oppressive and deadening to Miss Milner. The marriage vow between Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood is less a mutual plighting of troths than a stop order directed towards one person, a demand for Miss Milner’s reform. Overbearing, constricting, and transformative, the contract, as Sandford words it, promises less happiness than (at least to Miss Milner) suppression and restraint, ‘reform’ (178) in the root sense of that word: ‘Act but under the dominion of those vows,’ the old priest charges her, ‘… and you will be all that I, himself, or even heaven can desire. – Now then, Lord Elmwood, this moment give her up for ever; or this moment constrain her by such ties from offending you, she shall not dare to violate’ (178). Marriage, that solemn vow, will, Sandford hopes, ‘whip [Miss Milner] into shape’ at last, bring her to her rightful sense of place, tame her, break her. It is retaliatory, punitive, harnessing, and its ties are awful. These are the shackles of Los descending on Miss Milner: either her insurgency will at last be ‘contained’ by a more rightful sense of ‘place’ and her energy finally suppressed, or, as is the fate with all other vows in the novel, these troths too will be broken – and, indeed, Miss Milner on close examination studiously avoids committing herself throughout this exchange, evading the direct expression of agreement or consent. The mourning ring that Miss Milner receives on her espousal suggests the fetters of the marriage vow as well as the tragic and paradoxical conclusion to her career of transgressive love. The system she has challenged has finally called the question. Its punishment is to strong-arm her into the death grip of convention, of normalization, and within two pages of the narrative she is indeed at death’s door. As the two forces of Inchbald’s novel (age and youth, male and female, reason and passion) struggle for dominance,31 it becomes increasingly clear not only that no mutual ground is likely to be reached but also that neither ‘side’ in truth has interests at stake that transcend the self. The contention between Dorriforth and Miss Milner takes place against a background of vows made and broken: promises are contracted only to be riven because of some personal imperative or other. The eroding word gives one a heady impression of freedom, suggesting that something more ‘creative’ is afoot (authority is being challenged, orthodoxy uprooted). Yet one searches in vain for such a manifestation. Possibly, a ‘creative’ relationship of this kind can never be formalized, can never be delineated by ‘terms.’ But then, how can it reach true fruition? Only Sandford appears to feel any compunction about breaking promises; but even he, in his lengthy and torturous explanation to Miss Woodley about why

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she should not tell Miss Milner about what he has said, knows that he is using the language of ethics to mask his regnant self-interest. (His apologetic parentheses prove his awareness.) Otherwise, Lord Elmwood breaks his engagement with Miss Fenton as breezily (apparently) as Miss Milner defies his commands to stay at home on the night of the masquerade. And Inchbald, confusingly, endorses her dismissal by unceremoniously turning on her in a sardonic paragraph accusing her of frigidity and her brother of graft (131). But, as Milton’s Satan realizes, to break down authority is not to experience freedom;32 in this novel, wills pitted against each other are locked in a combat so extreme as not only to impede any true development but also to tighten and further constrict old and destructive definitions of self. As Miss Milner, for example, in an attempt to extricate herself from Dorriforth’s control, acts more outrageously than is natural to her (inviting the priest Sandford to ‘ogle’ her if she dresses as a nun for the masquerade [143]), so Dorriforth, under the press of ‘manag[ing]’ (43) such energies, hardens into a parody of a guardian, becoming more austere and prohibitory than before.33 Thus, the struggle for dominance feeds itself and guarantees nonfruition; any hearty challenge to the system is tainted by a personal wish for sovereignty that only pretends loyalty to a larger program. There is a kind of treacherous undercover game afoot here, as the two principals (especially Miss Milner) try to force their wills and codes on others. Until this urge for self-elevation and attention can be purged, the ‘system’ (such as it is) will not change, and Miss Milner’s assaults against it are, in fact, as ‘sacrilegious’ and ‘unwarrantable’ as Inchbald suggests – but not for erotic reasons. This concentrated and combative expression of the self’s needs and desires, Inchbald intimates, is inherently violatory as well as self-destructive. Miss Milner’s essays against Dorriforth are aimed to make him submit, to force him to forgive, in her famous declaration to Miss Woodley, ‘what [he] ought not to forgive’ (140). The language of atonement is interesting.34 Miss Milner’s desire for absolution, though cloaked in the rhetoric of the drawing room or courtship (to forgive ‘something that any prudent man ought not to forgive’ [140]), reveals an awareness of her own sin (as well as, perhaps, of Lord Elmwood’s purity), but her desire to be forgiven for a sin which no [prudent] man ought to pardon suggests an ethical world of extraordinary lopsidedness, in which the responsibility to act is all on one side. Miss Milner, aware that she has done and will do wrong, but lacking the energy to articulate how and why, desires forgiveness without the work of atonement, and without its components – in Swinburne’s analysis, repentance, apology, reparation, and penance.35 The achievement of such a design will put Miss Milner ‘on top’ with a vengeance, and she will receive absolution into the bargain, but what triumph, one might ask, is it to be queen of a world in which principles have been shaken to dust,

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in which action is accompanied by no ethical consequences whatsoever to the actor (only to him who is acted upon)? Dorriforth’s attempts to ‘manage’ Miss Milner merely perpetuate the problem of this kind of hedonism. In each crisis after their betrothal, attention is riveted upon the other in a way that aims to control. Each is so busy attempting to constrain or subordinate the other that the relationship becomes more directorial than personal. Thus it is as trivialized emotionally as it is ethically. Indeed, at the end of the game, neither has much authentic selfhood left. Miss Milner dies, suggestively, without a ‘will,’ speaking from a past incarnation as Dorriforth’s ward, as the ‘child whom [Mr Milner] trusted to your care’ (199),36 or as nothing (‘no such person as I am’ [198]), erasing her connection to the child for whom she is imploring Lord Elmwood’s protection. Lord Elmwood buries his emotions and assumes the pose of a hard-hearted tyrant. This is, perhaps, in part, the only possible conclusion to a program of self-assertion that has revolved, paradoxically enough, around withholding the self (a strategy that Miss Milner employs, hauntingly and tellingly, even in the marriage ceremony hastily provised by Sandford).37 In his analysis of the Tristan myth, Denis de Rougemont equates adulterous love with love for obstruction per se, and argues that its ultimate end is death, the ‘far more awful passion’ that is concealed by Tristan’s ‘love of love itself’ (46). Miss Milner is a double adulteress, first in her infatuation with a man who serves as her father and who is already bound by sacred vows to the Church, and, second, in her liaison with the Duke of Avon after her marriage to Lord Elmwood. It is, first, the obstacle of Dorriforth’s position and, second, the obstacle of his pride that piques Miss Milner’s curiosity and that she makes it her special business to surmount. That the end of such urges is death is suggested iconically by the mourning ring that seals her marriage to Lord Elmwood and by her exile and death after her affair with Lord Frederick. Prefigured, as it were, from ‘on high’ (with the device of the mourning ring), death is made to seem the logical and inevitable end of her transgressive actions. Miss Milner’s enterprise is oriented towards death in part because it breaks all systems of mutuality, resisting configurations of exchange in which she does not occupy the foreground38 and prizing the body’s signs, which are idiosyncratic and personal, above those mutually agreed upon codes of language and decorum. In developing such a view, Inchbald points to the darker side of the semiotics of sentiment: its asocial, indeed anarchic potential. Inchbald subscribes enthusiastically to such an expressive program, exhibiting over and over again her fascination with the language of the body and her scepticism towards or lack of interest in conventional linguistic utterances.39

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Miss Milner’s attitude towards language is offhand. She is impudent, defying her culture’s expectations of linguistic decorum and moderation; she rails; she lies. Her bodily expressions (her starts, her tears, her blushes), because they arise from a deeper and more ‘personal’ source, are at once more intensely felt and hence more ‘true’ (though that truth is individual and passional) than her linguistic utterances. As with Crusoe, they appear to render the language of a ‘deeper’ self, and hence seem more authentic, though that authenticity is measured negatively, against a system of expression that is more decorous and more controlled. The sudden and volatile nature of these expressions betrays the ineptness of the superego, as Miss Milner’s desires, unarticulated (and often unarticulatable) in language, erupt from her in violent floods (of tears) or surges of blood. Upon Dorriforth’s sudden entrance into the room during a discussion of monastic and marriage vows, Miss Milner’s face expresses the depth of her feelings towards her guardian: At that instant Dorriforth entered the room. The colour had mounted into Miss Milner’s face from the warmth with which she had delivered her opinion [about the purity of Dorriforth’s regard for her], and his entering at the very moment this compliment had been paid in his absence, heightened the blush to a deep glow on every feature, and a confusion that trembled on her lips and shook through all her frame. (22–3)

At the conclusion of this scene, Miss Milner, shocked at the aptness of Lord Frederick’s sneering allusion to Heloisa and Abelard, throws open the sash and, in a curiously athletic gesture, holds her head out at the window to conceal her embarrassment (24) (which must be legible on her features) at the implication that she is attracted to her priestly guardian. Miss Milner’s blushing, sighing, trembling, heaving, and weeping are the signs of a barely restrained turbulence within: her laughter, tears, and sighs ‘burst’ to the surface (14, 18, 29, 45) as if she is a cauldron of emotion.40 The violence of their eruption is in part due to the extreme (even taboo) nature of the feelings she wishes to keep from view – most importantly, her love for Dorriforth. Indeed, the ‘glow of joy’ upon her face is equated by Miss Woodley with ‘the glow … of guilt’ after Miss Milner’s revelation of her love for Dorriforth (74). The body indeed (particularly in blushing) tends to express emotions that ought to be suppressed: Here the strong glow of joy, and of gratitude, for an opinion so negligently, and yet so sincerely expressed, flew to Miss Milner’s face, neck, and even to her hands and fingers; the blood mounted to every part of her skin that was visible, for not a

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fibre but felt the secret transport, that Dorriforth thought her more beautiful than the beautiful Miss Fenton. (81)

Later, Miss Milner flushes because she cannot ‘govern her anger’ (144): the blush evinces a lack of self-control: both anger and desire should be governed but are not.41 Blushes also do not ‘communicate,’ per se, though they may ‘signal’ (105): they are in truth the language of the self, about the self, the self reflecting (usually negatively or censoriously) upon itself. As Inchbald notes, Miss Milner blushes ‘as she always did when the subject was herself’ (106). Thus, the language of the body is essentially narcissistic, and is restricted to carrying erotic or furious messages to itself that are meant to be concealed from others. (One cannot blush ‘on purpose.’ A blush is by definition accidental and unintentional.) Miss Milner’s marked increase in ‘coolness’ after her betrothal to Lord Elmwood – she rarely blushes after her passion has been requited – is one of those traits that denote her as unfeeling, as a player, eventually, for power rather than love. Indeed, after the betrothal, Lord Elmwood tends to take over the novel as chief blusher (usually with ‘male’ emotions such as anger, or confusion, or guilt), while Miss Milner, no longer constrained to disguise her desire, either does not blush or turns pale with conscious guilt, guilt that her mind approves. In these more ‘retractive’ essays of the body, sexual excitement or guilt has been replaced by an awareness of wrong or privation. In the scene in which she places her ‘cold hand’ upon Sandford, the blood that marked her as a desirous and desiring woman seems (as in the instances in which she turns pale or begins to faint [164, 169, 170, 176]) to have all but deserted her, revealing her as a victim (perhaps) of her own over-expenditure of emotion and foreshadowing the paleness and breathlessness of the fallen Lady Elmwood on her deathbed (188). Here, too, we see the link between payment (out) and loss, passion, and death. (The same ‘dead white’ pallor and breathlessness mark her on the day of her marriage [176–9].) Conversational language, in Inchbald’s world, by contrast to this deeply expressive and transgressive language of the body, is repeatedly ‘unmeaning’ (20): ‘But how unimportant, how weak, how ineffectual are words in conversation – looks and manners alone express’ (19). Hence, Inchbald’s characters tend to talk about things they don’t care about, as Miss Milner does during the absence of Dorriforth: ‘Such topics engaged their discourse, but not their thoughts, for near two hours’ (74).42 ‘Signals’ from the face (105), conversely, arrest and carry conviction: She had her eyes upon him as he spoke this, and discovered in his, which were fixed upon her, a sensibility unexpected – a kind of fascination which enticed

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her to look on, while her eye-lids fell involuntarily before its mighty force; and a thousand blushes crowded over her face: – He was struck with these sudden signals; hastily recalled his former countenance, and stopped the conversation. (105)

To gestures (‘looks’) Inchbald attributes the ability to convey more occult and complex messages, messages that slip by the monitors of decorum. Thus, when Dorriforth meets Miss Milner after the death of Lord Elmwood, Inchbald insists that language provides no avenue for Dorriforth to express his emotions: ‘though it was impossible to say, it was possible to look what he felt, and his looks expressed his feelings’ (97). (In the same scene Dorriforth grasps his ward’s hand without ‘knowing’ that he is doing so, though the cannier and more invasive Miss Milner does.) The exchange of information about Miss Milner’s love for Dorriforth takes place almost entirely without words: Dorriforth declares his knowledge through the passions that flash across his face; Miss Woodley confirms his discovery by hiding her face and weeping (124). This reciprocal gesturing is said to ‘[confirm Lord Elmwood] in the truth of his suggestion beyond what oaths could have done’ (124), and the entire high-strung scene is marked by dramatic shifts on the part of both characters in tones of voice and manner (quickness, confidence, smiles, warmth, blushes, astonishment, anxiety, hesitation, sighs, silence, force, earnestness, agitation, vehemence, tremulousness, confusion, and the distraught gestures of tears, hand claspings, and risings from one’s seat [123–4]). Inchbald is mistress (even, to a certain extent, pioneer) of scenes in which mistakes of the body or the energy of its response manifest themselves in startling and indecorous ways: scenes at table (126, 128) or at cards (127), where bodily decorum is expected, are inevitably telling, and the body jerks out its messages despite the mind’s attempt to ‘collect’ itself (167). Miss Milner thus betrays her concern at Lord Elmwood’s departure: ‘And so, my lord, you absolutely set off on Tuesday morning?’ This was Friday. Sandford and he both replied at the same time, ‘Yes.’ And Sandford, but not Lord Elmwood, looked at Miss Milner when he spoke. – Her knife and fork gave a sudden spring in her hand, but no other emotion witnessed what she felt. (166)

The body’s expressive music is abrupt and tense, and its creative surges can be as uncouth and inevitable as those of Crusoe: as Maria Edgeworth wrote of Inchbald’s technique, ‘By the force that is necessary to repress feeling, we judge of the intensity of the feeling; and you always contrive to give us by intelligible but simple signs the measure of this force’ (letter to Mrs Inchbald, 14 January 1810, quoted in Boaden 2: 153).

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On the eve of Dorriforth’s departure, the wordlessness of the lovers’ discourse testifies to the depth and ineffability of their passion: His lordship, after repeating to Miss Woodley his last night’s farewell, now went up to Miss Milner, and taking one of her hands, again held it between his, but still without speaking – while she, unable to suppress her tears as heretofore, suffered them to fall in torrents. ‘What is all this?’ cried Sandford, going up to them in anger. (177)

In this strange novel, in which language does not or cannot express, silence can be as expressive as talk, and seems to vibrate with the energy of the suppressed. After Dorriforth’s rebuke of Miss Milner for breaking her word about her plans for the evening, Mrs Horton rose from her seat – moved the decanters and the fruit round the table – stirred the fire – and came back to her seat again, before another word was uttered. – Nor had this good woman’s officious labours taken the least from the awkwardness of the silence, which as soon as the bustle she had made was over, returned in its full force. (30–1)

It would be misleading, however, to infer that gesture is more highly prized by Inchbald than language because language does not mean systematically or deeply. It is true that characters in her novel do speak in what she calls the ‘unmeaning language of the world’ (20). But language does not so much unmean, in the sense of not-mean, as it may mean something other than what it tacitly ‘says.’ As Dorriforth attempts to comfort Miss Milner after the scene in which Miss Milner (falsely) avows her love for Lord Frederick, Sandford echoes his words with an emphasis that conveys his lack of regard for Dorriforth’s ward: ‘Sandford, as he followed Dorriforth, bowed to Miss Milner too, and repeated the self-same words. – ‘And, madam, be assured my esteem for you, shall be the same as ever’ (69). The language of the body, by contrast, ‘means’ more truly and directly, as when Miss Milner sinks to the floor when she hears about the duel (66), or screams involuntarily when she sees evidence of Dorriforth’s wound (75): ‘[Miss Milner] took hold of one of [Sandford’s] hands, and pressed it with a kindness which told him he was welcome more forcibly, than if she had made the most elaborate speech to convince him of it’ (65). Speech, repeatedly, does not serve at moments of high emotion. At Miss Milner’s confession about her love for Dorriforth, ‘Miss Woodley at this sentence sat down – it was on a chair that was close to her – her feet could not have taken her to any other. – She

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trembled – she was white as ashes, and deprived of speech’ (71). When Dorriforth witnesses the amorous advances of Lord Frederick upon the hand of Miss Milner, he springs wordlessly towards him ‘with an instantaneous impulse’ and strikes him a blow in the face (60). As he drops upon his knees before Miss Milner, his posture communicates more vividly than his (hackneyed) words of contrition what motivated his action, and Miss Milner trembles with ‘agitation and emotion’ at the picture (61). The scene of Lord Elmwood’s leave-taking epitomizes the primacy of the body as a communicator of high emotion, with the banality of Sandford’s supplication serving to cushion, with kindly, unmeaning words, the moment of intense distress: Miss Milner started at the sound [of Lord Elmwood’s carriage at the door]; so did he; but she had nearly dropped her cup and saucer: on which Sandford took them out of her hand, saying, ‘Perhaps you had rather have coffee?’ Her lips moved, but he could not hear what she said. (177)

Miss Milner’s muteness here (her lips move but she apparently ‘says’ nothing), paradoxically, is more expressive than any verbal reply could have been. And Sandford’s words, though they mean well, do not address in any way the pitch and tenor of this scene. Thus, vows in A Simple Story are problematic in part because they are cast in language, a language that is perforce ‘clear and explicit’ (202). In documentary form (that is, as wills – the homonym is telling), vows bind via a medium (language) that conversationally can not-mean; but of a vow, there can be no ‘mistaking [of] meaning’ (202). Perhaps vows tend to dissolve in A Simple Story because they are cast linguistically (though what a ‘bodily’ vow might consist of, Inchbald does not intimate); or perhaps they break because, as is necessary with all performative utterances, the investment of self in a language upon the value and meaning of which no one agrees is, to Inchbald, too risky an enterprise. No one in the novel, despite Inchbald’s description of Sandford as ‘scrupulously exact’ (48), is careful about observing his or her word, and, in instances in which a character keeps the terms of his promise (the dismissal of the head gardener, the eviction of Lady Matilda), the actions are clearly meant to be read as overly harsh, even unnatural. Inchbald here, as elsewhere, oscillates between faulting a system that is so brittle as to make itself vulnerable to collapse and calling nostalgically upon a world in which such authority and certainty have not yet been eroded. Part of the issue, too, resides in a marked difference in attitudes of men

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and women to the word. As Eleanor Ty has remarked, Miss Milner repeatedly challenges the patriarchal view of the Word (the Logos, the symbolic order) by her habits of equivocation and gesture (89–90). The way in which she reads Miss Woodley’s letter, sent to her in Bath, epitomizes her idiosyncratic and passional style that has much in common with the fetishistic hermeneutics in which her daughter will later engage: A letter arrived – she devoured it with her eyes. – The post mark on the outside denoting from whence it came, the name of ‘Milner Lodge’ written on the top, were all sources of pleasure – and she read slowly every line it contained to procrastinate the pleasing expectation she enjoyed, till she should arrive at the name of Dorriforth. At last her impatient eye, caught the word three lines beyond the place she was reading – irresistibly, she skipped over those lines, and fixed on the point to which she was attracted. (93–4)

Notable here is the conceptualization of the letter as object, imbibed in a passionate, physically satisfying way. Miss Milner ‘devours’ it, incarnates it. Postmark and return address are dwelt upon with an avidity that reveals the words as signifiers of passionate and private meaning, a reservoir of hopes and memories upon which Miss Milner can draw. She reads passionately, flirtatiously, deliberately prolonging the moment of climax (her sight of the name of Dorriforth) until she can bear it no longer. Though there is an affinity here with Defoe’s ‘physicalization’ of language (in that language can, in its objectorientation, have a near physical impact on the reader or writer), Miss Milner’s reading style is the opposite of Crusoe’s careful and respectful itemization of word-things. Challenging the rules of decorum, morality, and language in the way that she does would be, in effect, criminal did not Miss Milner (or, rather, Inchbald) desire to effect significant change of some kind. Pitting her main character against the epitome of autocracy – a male, a priest, a Father – and allowing her to question both its assumptions and mechanics, it becomes incumbent upon Inchbald (as an ideologue) either to replace the ‘outmoded’ system with one that is new, or restore the old system with some improvements made upon it. (The language of expiation and amendment, of guilt and atonement [129, 154, 185, 189], hints at such a program of restoration as does the novel’s binary or ‘replay’ structure.) Miss Milner’s ‘system’ (if it can be called by such a grand name – it is, rather more accurately, an anti-system), however, clearly, even by definition, cannot ‘stand’ – in its essence, it defies logic and mutuality on every level. And Miss Milner’s exile, and the evacuation of her will, pronounce the irrevocability of her fall. Indeed, Inchbald seems intent to show that

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as much as Miss Milner expiates, she cannot herself atone for her crime, however that crime is construed.43 And her erasure of herself is made clear through repeated references to an absence of will (‘Lady Elmwood left [no] will’ [194]; ‘She had no will, she said, but what she would wholly submit to Lord Elmwood’s’ [191]) as well as through her trick of eliding herself from any genealogical relationship to her husband: Matilda, supplicated for, is named not ‘their’ but ‘his’ child (189); her last word is not ‘husband’ but ‘Father,’ by which she invokes Sandford’s aid in uniting Lord Elmwood with the Lady Matilda. Her letter to Lord Elmwood is to be read not for her own but ‘for her father’s sake’ and it is addressed to him from his ‘ward’ (199), the ‘child whom [Mr Milner] entrusted to your care’ (199). Such a presentation cements self-elevation and self-denial, effectively demonstrating the dead end to Miss Milner’s aggressive marketing of the self. In so doing, Miss Milner proves the impossibility of personal atonement; not only does she deny the forward march of time, as she strategically does in her refusal to commit herself to any systematic course of action, but also she tries even here to rewind it, regaining (without earning) the innocence she has lost by engaging in a posture of self-erasure that is profoundly unsettling, given Inchbald’s clear attraction to a relationship of vehement mutuality. But it is, in effect, only Inchbald who obstructs that process. Why should atonement necessitate such self-obliteration, such languor? Miss Milner could as easily have been made forcibly aware of her sin and, in that awareness and acceptance of fault, gained, as with the characters of Fielding, a kind of moral stature. Instead, Inchbald has her fall sick and linger (187). Such verbs are antithetical to the Miss Milner of Volumes I and II. Does the only acceptable penitence consist in such a radical elision of the self, in such self-loathing, that one has no will (191)? Surely the solution to a struggle of wills is not the submission of one will to that of another, especially to one who is, as Lord Elmwood is called in this section of the story, ‘inexorable’ (187), ‘implacable’ (183), and unjust (183), one so obsessed with revenge (186) that he will use others in his project to harm one now beyond the reach of any resentment, as Miss Milner’s letter vividly describes herself (199).44 Troubling, too, is the exaggerated separation of gender spheres that marks the end of Miss Milner’s reign, with the women sick and weeping, suffering, will-less, and alienated, and the men contracting vows, holding themselves and others to ‘unshaken resolution[s]’ (190), solemn declarations (191), strict commands (201), as if gender roles have become even more polarized than before. Radical challenges to the status quo, the hint seems to be, will tend to send the system into petrifaction rather than make it more malleable, doing more damage to the ‘cause’ than more tentative essays might do.45

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Lord Elmwood remains in the last two volumes of A Simple Story – which, in effect, take up the political and emotional agenda abandoned by Inchbald in the first half of the work – the object of desire and the target of change: Matilda resumes her mother’s project to reform the father, replacing Miss Milner’s indecorousness with an emphasis on propriety (204), her brashness with timidity (204), and an attitude of combative familiarity with a posture of ‘awe, and terror’ (205). The tremulous esteem in which Miss Woodley and Lady Matilda hold Lord Elmwood (‘Even her mother had not a more exalted and transcendent idea of Lord Elmwood’s worth, than his daughter had formed’ [205]) dislodges the earlier attitude of mutual regard in favour of awe, reestablishing the conventional hierarchy (father-daughter, powerful male-placating female) with a vengeance, and priming the reader to hope, above all else, for a reunion between these two characters, these two ‘victims’ of sensibility. In so doing, we seem confusingly to be invited to buy into the very program Inchbald has denied Miss Milner, to accept an earlier, but actually by now discounted, image of Lord Elmwood as an ‘exalted’ example of ‘human nature’ (5) – though this perspective, interestingly, is that of a male friend. Our relationship to Lord Elmwood – like that of Matilda – is thus based inevitably on distance and idealization (and also on a homosocial model), certainly not attitudes that can or should be transported into the marriage relationship, as Inchbald shows in her repeated reluctance to depict such a state.46 That Matilda’s happiness should depend so exclusively on acceptance by her father, who is, in fact, studiously ‘negligent’ (188) of her suffering, creates a relationship of dependency that is, in fact, profoundly destructive. Indeed, Lord Elmwood commands Lady Matilda’s attention so exclusively – and she desires his acceptance so eagerly – that the project of self-actualization upon which Inchbald appears to have embarked seems deeply compromised. Forced to cooperate in Lord Elmwood’s designs to overlook her existence, Lady Matilda hesitates to assert herself, retreating in haste at his approach and secluding herself in her apartments during his visits to Elmwood Castle. Even more pathologically, Lady Matilda engages in fetishistic displacements of desire that establish not only herself but also others as ‘transparent,’ looking with ‘reverence and awe’ upon Sandford because he is ‘honoured with the friendship of her father’ (203). She estimates Lord Elmwood’s character not by what he does to her (excluding and avoiding her) but by what she has heard of him from the conversations of Lady Elmwood and Miss Woodley. In an interesting exchange between Matilda and Sandford, Inchbald calls attention to Matilda’s generosity in extenuating the faults of her father and the frailty of the foundation upon which she builds her hopes of reunion:

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‘If he does but think of me with tenderness,’ cried Matilda, ‘I am recompensed.’ ‘And what recompense would his kind thoughts be to you,’ said Sandford, ‘were he to turn you out to beggary?’ ‘A great deal – a great deal,’ she replied. ‘But how are you to know he has these kind thoughts, while he gives you no proof of them?’ ‘No, Mr Sandford; but supposing we could know them without the proof.’ ‘But as that is impossible,’ answered he, ‘I shall suppose, till the proof appears, I am mistaken.’ Matilda looked deeply concerned that the argument should conclude in her disappointment; for to have believed herself thought of with tenderness by her father, would have alone constituted her happiness. (211–12)

Matilda here clearly does all the work in this relationship, excusing her father in advance for what he does or will do (turn her out to beggary), because of what he thinks or might think (kind thoughts), and even suggesting an epistemology based on supposition (or desire) rather than proof (an epistemology that Sandford brusquely rejects as ‘impossible’). As it happens, of course, Matilda is correct in knowing her father’s tenderness without the proof; but the cost of such investment of energy into another, as with her mother’s more frantic assertions of self, is ultimately debilitating, for in ‘decoding’ the action of another, Lady Matilda effectively relieves her father from the responsibility of acting according to his heart’s dictates, as if the ‘contract,’ as it were, were all on one side. (It is needless to say that, in elevating Lord Elmwood in the way that the exiled and repentant Lady Elmwood apparently has, Lady Matilda is again casting herself in a position in which any significant change in intimate relations – because vision has been deflected and romanticized – is impossible.)47 Inchbald’s attention to the kind of action ‘by proxy’ that distinguishes the second part of her novel is a complex signal of those issues of distance so central to A Simple Story.48 Inhabiting the house of her father, Lady Matilda is simultaneously connected to him while remaining ‘detached’ (210) (the term is used to refer to the architectural relationship of her apartments to the other part of the house); or, more accurately, it is by means of that detachment that she is connected to him. Their cohabitation is predicated on a strict prohibition that Lord Elmwood never ‘see or hear from’ his daughter (201), a prohibition that is, as Lord Elmwood takes pains to point out, literal, not metaphorical. He must not see her body, or hear her voice.49 Denied her touch (and she his), both characters develop a supersensitivity to any atmosphere that may carry the imprint of the other: Matilda enters Elmwood Castle with a sensation of awe (206)

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and exclaims at the pleasure of ‘sleep[ing] under the same roof with … [,] in the same house with my father’ (206, 212). She puts her mark on the place by walking over the extensive gardens, touring the house in her father’s absence, and gazing at the portrait of Lord Elmwood, clinging to Sandford after he has been in Lord Elmwood’s company as if to draw closer to her father. She is preternaturally aware of his proximity, and it strikes her with admiration: ‘How strange is this!’ cried Matilda, when Miss Woodley and she were alone, ‘My father within a few rooms of me, and yet I am debarred from seeing him! – Only by walking a few paces I might be at his feet, and perhaps receive his blessing.’ ‘You make me shudder,’ said Miss Woodley; ‘but some spirits less fearful than mine, might perhaps advise you to try the experiment.’ (212)

Indeed, direct (visual, or, even more so, tactile) contact with her father appears to be insupportable, and Lady Matilda connects it with a kind of ecstasy that would be fatal, ‘a sensation, a feeling, I could not survive’ (207). Her paleness at the news of her father’s arrival (208–9) and her swoon on the stairs couple in this way delight and demise. Thus, Lord Elmwood’s daughter is reduced to seeking paternal love by proxy, pressing Miss Woodley’s hand, which Lord Elmwood has held, to her lips with love and reverence (214). Miss Woodley, similarly, carrying, as it were, the imprint of Matilda, deliberately visits Lord Elmwood to cause him to think on his daughter.50 Rushbrook is defended and envied because of his relationship to Lord Elmwood (217–18). Lord Elmwood is revered the more by Rushbrook for his relationship to his daughter (225). Lord Elmwood says, towards the end of his first visit, that he feels more ‘attached’ to his house than he has ever done in his life, and, on that basis, decides to pass his Christmas there (227). Such projections (Lord Elmwood’s love for his estate, his reluctance at departing, his warmth in bidding farewell to Sandford, his backwards glances as he leaves, his later careful culling of books for Miss Woodley [254]) are all the effect of a suppressed wish to make contact with Matilda, and, at the moment of her father’s departure, Matilda’s touring of the house, her leaning over the seats upon which her father had been wont to sit, and particularly her handling of his pen, books, and hat (229–30) show how eagerly Matilda waits for such an event. Desire at this juncture is better than fulfilment – not in a flirtatious sense, but because it is clearer, cleaner, more finely tuned. Indeed, in a curious way, for both Lady Matilda and Lord Elmwood in this section of the novel, action of any overt or emotionally demonstrative kind is unseemly. When Viscount Margrave (in his emphasis on self-service, a kind of unrefined version of Miss

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Milner, and of Lord Frederick) ‘acts’ on his passions, he is seen as criminal and brutal, and when Rushbrook steps in on Miss Woodley and Lady Matilda it is regarded as a kind of violation (222–4, 245). The incident on the stairs shows, indeed, how fatal true conjunction is. Accident and volition are in this scene deliberately blurred: on hearing a footstep ‘walking slowly up’ (255) – an audial and metonymic hallmark of the distant (lonely) Father (contrast the strangely static anti-footstep, the footprint on the sand in Robinson Crusoe, into which Crusoe has to inject, as it were, a presence, threatening to his sense of self and geographic safety) – Matilda ‘hesitate[s]’ whether to proceed or turn back, and then proceeds a few steps to meet her father on the landing place. Thus the two draw, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, one knowingly, one unknowingly (but which one?), closer on a precarious walkway. Matilda, who has heard the ‘authority … in the sound of his steps’ (255), must on some level court this meeting; its taboo quality is confirmed by the fact that her ‘fears,’ mentioned four times in this paragraph, ‘confirmed her it was him’ (a curious locution). Desire, fear, and death couple to produce a primal scene of paternal/filial embrace in which time and consciousness appear erased: Matilda falls into a swoon, and Lord Elmwood cries out to her by the name of his lost wife. Shame, pity, anger, and tenderness contend in the husband-father as Matilda supplicates him with the words, ‘Save me’ (255). The complexity of this supplication is pronounced. Does it arise from Lady Matilda’s (and Inchbald’s) awareness that love is the most fundamental need of all human beings, that the kind of earthly love that Matilda desires is the only foundation of mortal happiness? Or does it arise from the attempt to exculpate the self from the (erotic) desire for the father, the ‘one command’ she has disobeyed (257)? Whatever the answer, in ‘reality’ – at this stage, at any rate – one motive is inextricable from the other: to have is to lose; to enact one’s desire, however laudable, is to do wrong (256). As Matilda cries upon Miss Woodley’s report to her that her meeting with her father was not a dream, ‘Then I suppose I must go away’ (256). Conjunction indeed here spells separation; in this world, in which physical contact is so highly charged, so ‘adulterous,’ in the root sense of that term, a desire, in containing the germ of action, itself becomes accountable. In the words of Matthew, he who lusts after a woman in his heart has committed adultery. The very heart must be laid open to the censor here, and his proceedings are scrupulous and exact. (An implicit contrast is made in this instance to Miss Milner, who evades such self-examinations.) Yet they are also misguided, because, of course, Matilda has done wrong in falling into her father’s arms only if one accepts the rightness of his commands (which we do not). Yet it is not we who spell out the consequences here; it is Lord Elmwood. His ‘cruel’

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(the adjective is both Matilda’s and Sandford’s [262–3]) fulfilment of his word (his letter of dismissal, composed by his house steward, is contractual and distant in tone, except in the observations he takes the liberty to make himself) leaves Matilda prey to a much more brutal embrace: that of the rapacious Viscount Margrave. Rushbrook then steps in as a kind of surrogate to the Lady Matilda, whom he loves and for whose protection he implores Lord Elmwood, suffering banishment and restitution within a single chapter shortly following the eviction of Lord Elmwood’s daughter. Lord Margrave’s licentious proposals to Matilda reenact the taboo liaison between Lord Frederick and Miss Milner (he himself points out the model) as if Inchbald is putting Lord Elmwood to the (paternal) proof: will he this time exercise proper guardianship? To do so, complexly, for him involves exorcising the ghost of his wife, of disengaging mother and daughter; ‘prov[ing] [him]self … father’ (305) (not husband) is here seen as the triumph of his humanism and love and Lord Elmwood finally grabs his pistols and delivers his daughter through a resonant scene of phallic power. (A report of a pistol on the staircase heralds the demise of Lord Margrave’s plans and the fond parental embrace, and Matilda clings to his legs in a posture of reverence.) In a complex way, Matilda here iconographically performs the penitence from which her mother was precluded: she kneels to her father and bathes his feet with her tears as Lord Margrave is given over to the law. The brutality of illicit sex and the duel, which marked the tragic career of Lord Elmwood in earlier volumes, here shrinks to a single auditory ‘report of a pistol on the staircase’ (308) and a querulous Lord Margrave en route to justice; the carriage scene, in which Lady Matilda leans her head against her father in ‘the sweetest slumber imagination can conceive’ (310), similarly detoxifies the episode in the coach in which Miss Milner falls asleep in her androgynous costume after the untoward visit to the masquerade. Indeed, so antiseptic is the atmosphere at this juncture of the novel that the eventual union of Rushbrook and Matilda resembles that of two children more than that of two passionate adults, and Inchbald veers from a description of their betrothal to a hypothetical account of Matilda’s acceptance of her ‘companion’ (316) in marriage. On Rushbrook’s application for her hand, Inchbald writes coyly, ‘Whether the heart of Matilda, such as it has been described, could sentence him to misery, the reader is left to surmise – and if he supposes that it did not, he has every reason to suppose their wedded life was a life of happiness’ (318). Positives and negatives jostle here in an uncomfortable way and the novel sums up with a dislocatory admonition about female education.51 It is a curious ending. Inchbald’s sonorous sentences and the uppercase letters with which the narrative concludes do little to mask the enervated, conven-

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tional tone of the second half of the novel. Matilda, the ‘ghost’ of her mother, is an orthodox heroine of sensibility who meets her male counterpart in the effeminate Rushbrook. Lord Margrave is a pasteboard villain who, as Sandford surprisingly points out, has none of the ‘breeding’ (283) of the Duke of Avon (which makes his designs upon Matilda, apparently, even more sullied in the catalogue of sexually violent acts than the ‘aristocratic’ adultery performed by Matilda’s mother and her former lover). Rushbrook and Matilda, too, are brought together after a scene in which the Father engages in a near parody of the primal one of banishment: as Lord Elmwood pronounces Rushbrook’s exile, Miss Woodley lifts up her hands, sighs, and Sandford rises ‘slowly from his seat to execute his office’ (316). Within a page, Rushbrook is not only restored to favour but has also gained Lady Matilda’s hand in marriage. Such defusing (characteristic of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) is perhaps part of the necessary cleansing of the Miss Milnerism of the novel, and the sense of reenactment and transparency among the characters, and in the narrative of incipient separation and reconciliation, is in itself an act of narrative ‘atonement’ for bringing up issues of the self and mutual relations that have not been adequately resolved. To emasculate such issues, however, is to retreat from their energy and urgency; it is to suggest that women’s forays against the patriarchal order must be covert, not overt, and that though battles may be won, they are somehow still retrogressive ones. Matilda’s triumph is in reunion with her father, not in union with Rushbrook; it is in ‘repairing’ the crimes of her mother. Surrogacy and proxy are as inadequate solutions to questions of selfhood as are evasion and overinvestment of the self in another: both involve a projection of the self that is not so much the mark of love as of dependency, as in the case of Matilda, or a bat-like need for a sounding-board, as in the case of Miss Milner, a boundary, a limit against which to measure the (illusory) power and innovations of the self.

6 Frankenstein: Dissociation

Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley outlines, with terrible certitude, the catastrophic results of embodiment and the abrogation of freedom that follows in its wake. Whereas for Defoe, the issue of corporealization manifests itself chiefly as a spiritual dilemma (how can the body adequately ‘translate’ messages from the spirit or from God?), and where for Richardson and Inchbald, the ramifications are largely personal and social, for Shelley, the problem seems most pressing as an artistic one, as her subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus,’ makes clear. Authorship – at once gruelling, harrowing, unhallowed, and monstrous – forms the subject of her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein of 1831. Here, as throughout Frankenstein, it is the difficult conjunction of thought (imagination) and story that occupies her attention. ‘Putting down the suggestions of my … mind’1 proves a nightmarish enterprise associated by Shelley with forceful violation (she is forever pressed, she reports, by Percy Shelley to write; the idea for Frankenstein comes to her ‘unbidden’; it ‘possesse[s],’ it ‘haunt[s]’ her) and grim birth (196). The whimsical ghost story contest seems to place Shelley on a threatening treadmill in which she feels driven to compose, though none of the other participants appears to have given it much serious thought, and she records her mortification at her repeated failures to deliver. ‘Dilat[ing] upon … idea[s],’ as Shelley’s suggestive phrase has it (192 [1831]), is the central problem of Frankenstein, both in the work’s genesis and evolution and in its ideology. The result is a piece that demonstrates the disjointedness of the cre-

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ative process and a profound scepticism about the ennobling possibilities of art. The question of authorial intent in Frankenstein has received attention since the publication of the novel in 1818. Shelley’s work invites reading as a sociopolitical treatise, as a critique on aesthetics (especially Romantic idealism), as a warning against scientific overreaching, and as a psychoanalytic study.2 Its strong connections to Mary Shelley’s life and its self-consciousness as a literary text, as Gilbert and Gubar (among others) have shown (221–47), lend a further sense of diffuseness to the work, giving the tale an air of incoherence for which it is often faulted. This non-cohesiveness, as I have argued elsewhere (Failure of Gothic), is characteristic of the genre to which Frankenstein is often, if too hastily, assigned: the Gothic. And Shelley self-deprecatorily connects her undertaking with such romances in her introduction to the Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein of 1831.3 The incoherence and overinscription that characterize Shelley’s novel may certainly in part be attributed to Shelley’s own artistic naïveté. Stephen C. Behrendt notes Shelley’s anxious tendency towards ‘encyclopedic expansiveness,’ as if in response to Godwin’s prescription for an ideal reading program (‘a tableful of open books, all of which are being read at once, in a rotation of browsing’) (78). Such a project guarantees, in Behrendt’s view, works with a high degree of intertextuality (and not necessarily connectedness, a problem exacerbated by Percy Shelley’s intrusions into Mary’s text).4 As if in opposition to this porous and amorphous text (severally authored and refracted through multiple points of view), Shelley creates an artist-protagonist who works from a directly divergent ideology: isolated from his fellows, insensible to all but his ‘one pursuit’ (37), wilfully disclaiming any imaginative or moral connection to the world that provides the materials of his art, Shelley’s creator can corporealize, can incarnate a way that is technically successful (in a way that surely would have astonished his mentors, M. Krempe and M. Waldman), but cannot create a work of beauty or of utility. His art, in woeful addition, cannot transcend his self in any way; on the contrary, it appears to distil out and imbrute its creator’s more refined and benevolent impulses (or prove their insubstantiality), becoming a vehicle for Frankenstein’s far less emulable qualities: his isolationism, his rage, and his disgust towards humankind. The sin of creating such art is compounded by its creator’s abdication of responsibility for it (Frankenstein’s disavowal of his creature in the scene at the bed), his concerted attempts to estrange himself from it, and his disregard for his part in the crimes the Creature commits.5 In refusing such responsibility, however painful it may be to confess one’s complicity in such a reign of terror, Frankenstein becomes enchained to the object of his creation, inseparable in both a

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physical and a symbolic sense from it. In Frankenstein’s own telling association of himself with his devil-monster, his creation is ‘[his] own vampire, [his] own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to [him]’ (57). In this strange figure, Frankenstein’s creature enacts its author’s deepest, and most deeply suppressed, fears or his most hideously inarticulable desires. On all levels, the materialization of an idea is the fatal touchstone both for rendering visible the true motives for Frankenstein’s project and for the agony, blasphemy, and destructiveness of creation itself; and it compounds the agony by yoking its creator in an irrevocable relationship of responsibility to that particular moment of investiture. How – and why – a dream of beauty (39), ‘a torrent of light’ (36), should materialize as a ‘filthy mass’ (121), a ‘demoniacal corpse’ (40) to which its creator is irreversibly and self-destructively joined is largely the subject – and fear – of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The issue here is not simply that of Frankenstein’s usurpation of a female role,6 nor of Mary Shelley’s own vocational or maternal fears, but the very foundation of these authorial enterprises: it involves a questioning of the ‘enacting’ imagination, the relationship of bodily matters and objects to imaginative thought. Much of Frankenstein’s failure as an artist may be traced to an antipathetic sensibility that resists the coming together of body and spirit, hand and mind. His preference for keeping discrete the physical and the spiritual, the intellectual, and the moral marks him in part as a Scheidekünstler, insufficiently weaned from his early mentors, Agrippa and Paracelsus. Frankenstein’s studied reluctance to register the ‘truth’ of the physical (his inability to work in tandem with the material and the intellectual) is seen both in the way he physically declines as his project takes shape and in how his ideas of the Creature’s appearance throughout his project blind him to the fact of its ugliness. Such sweeping aside of the object-world guarantees, in Baldick’s analysis, a monstrous reassertion of the physical, in the form of the violent and grotesque body of the Creature (50).7 Frankenstein’s shock at the collision of the two realms at the moment of the monster’s ‘birth’ shows how ‘disembodied’ and (hence) piecemeal his creative imagination has been: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe [Frankenstein exclaims], or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (39)

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Frankenstein’s bewilderment at the object of his creation reveals his view of art (its semblance to that of Swift is startling) as a by-product – even a waste product – of his idealism, of a self-elevation that he already manically feels as a result of having made the discovery that he can create. ‘Dizzy’ with the success of his labours, Frankenstein feels ‘chosen’ well before the Creature stirs into life, ‘surprised that among so many men of genius … I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret’ (34). The figurative language of rush and rapture marks his account of his creative mood: No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. (36)

The way in which Frankenstein’s ‘supernatural enthusiasm’ (33) inures him to the ‘irksome, and almost intolerable [application to his study]’ (33) (the ‘painful labour’ [34], the ‘inconceivable difficulty and labour’ [35]) and the toll the work takes on Frankenstein’s physical frame, as well as the scale on which Frankenstein decides to operate, point to a grotesquely and destructively literal manifestation (as in the case of Crusoe’s longboat) of Frankenstein’s feelings of giganticism and the monstrous nature of such an act of hubris.8 Neither author (Frankenstein or Shelley) exhibits much subtlety about the way in which an idea may be translated into the material realm. In Frankenstein’s case, this is the eye winking at the hand with a vengeance: like Macbeth (or Shylock), Shelley’s scientist is propelled forward by an idea that should not be realized, by one that requires a wilful dissociation of the moral self if it is to be executed. When such a desire is incarnated (without due thought or connection to the trajectory between desire and its realization), why should there be any surprise that it bears little resemblance to the original conception of the deed? Frankenstein’s spiritualization of Elizabeth, which accompanies – and to a certain extent fuels – his act of solitary creation,9 appears to have a similar backlash effect: her materialization as Frankenstein’s bride (an event repeatedly postponed by Frankenstein) brings on the act of brutal violence that ends in her death. Embodiment of desire, the joining of physical and intellectual realms, is seen in both instances as negative and destructive. Less clear is where, for a writer who regards art and interpersonal relations as equally sacrosanct, the solution to such a dilemma lies. Frankenstein inhabits a domestic world that, especially in the 1831 edition, tends towards rather strict apportionment

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of duties by gender and familial role, and his career at Ingolstadt is characterized by a more radical insistence on division: his remoteness from domestic and sexual concerns allows him to concentrate more fully on his work.10 Walton, though significantly more humanistic than Frankenstein, offers no answer that would be even marginally acceptable to the artist-scientist: his return to England marks the failure of his (fatuous) scientific enterprise. Nowhere do the aspirer and the happy man coincide. The moral lessons recommending a tranquil life by the hearth that Shelley has Frankenstein deliver in the course of the novel (35, 37–8) are not enacted, and serve less to mend than to aggravate the split between the domestic and intellectual spheres. And nowhere in the text does Shelley’s apparent urging that man should embrace his domestic lot with equanimity find support. Such elysium, as also, perhaps, in A Simple Story, is a construct of shaky nostalgia, its unsoundness demonstrated by the way in which Frankenstein (in his dream) can revisit and revise it to suit the terms of his own pathology. Even the most innocent and remote (Justine, Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s mother) are blighted by man’s eagerness to ascend. Thus, though Shelley identifies and dramatizes problems of embodiment in her novel, she fails, ultimately, to devise responses to the question she raises: examples of more ‘integrated’ psyches in the work who might fend off such yearnings (Clerval, the enlightened Walton, and, to a certain extent, Frankenstein’s father) fall victim (in most cases, literally) to Shelley’s fiercer program condemning dissociation and the rejection of the physical. It is not surprising that Frankenstein refers to his workshop as one of ‘filthy’ creation (the adjective recurs repeatedly in conjunction with the monster and is also used to describe the creation of its mate). The process and result are ‘filthy’ not only because they are largely physical (hence, to Frankenstein, polluting, unrefined),11 but also because they require a conjunction of intellectual and manual exercise that is itself unsettling.12 Frankenstein’s enquiries into the ‘causes of life’ are described in terms that emphasize his violation of something sacrosanct (the dignity of the human frame) and in language that reveals both a physical intimacy with and a revulsion towards his task, a nausea that returns even in his recounting of the period to Walton: Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel

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houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. (36–7)

Frankenstein inhabits a world in which categories of all kinds tend to be better if they remain separate and distinct. Such a purificatory desire is especially marked in the physical and mental arenas, where the incursion of one realm into the other leads to insurmountable problems of artistic expression. The rhetoric of split and rupture that characterizes Frankenstein’s description of his creative process points to the determined separation of mind and matter in the artist’s ‘workshop of filthy creation’: propelled by some kind of divine or demonic afflatus, which Frankenstein variously calls ‘enthusiasm’ (33, 36, 38), ‘eagerness’ (36, 37), and ‘ardour’ (32, 35, 36, 39), he simultaneously records the ‘irksome, and almost intolerable [application]’ to his study (33), the ‘painful labour’ (34) (the work of ‘inconceivable difficulty and labour’ [35]) that makes his eyes start from their sockets, his body feverish, and his nature turn from his occupation with loathing. Marxist critics of Frankenstein note here a reflection of Marx’s idea of alienated labour, a situation that governs both Frankenstein’s creation of the Creature and the Creature itself, with Frankenstein attempting to deny the materiality of his creation and emphasizing in the composite body of the Creature the materiality he and his society so vividly feared (see Michie 96–7; Montag 392–5). Frankenstein’s assumption that the body is rooted in things corrupt directs the program of his scientific research: his inquiries into physiology (which he defines loosely as the study of ‘the causes of life’ [33]) lead him immediately not, as might be figuratively logical, to the obstetrical ward but to abodes of death (churchyards, vaults, graves, and charnel houses [33–4, 36]). Later, in the creation of the Creature, he draws his ‘[raw] materials’ from ‘the dissecting room and the slaughter-house’ (37). His activities at these sites are described as theoretically and practically abhorrent and unnatural – ‘irksome’ (33), ‘intolerable’ (33), ‘insupportable,’ ‘loathsome’ (37), ‘unwholesome’ (38) – more so because the idea of his enterprise strikes him as so wonderful. Recalling the period to Walton (well after the murders of William, Clerval, and Elizabeth, and the related deaths of Justine Moritz and Alphonse Frankenstein), he is still moved, astonishingly, unregenerately, by the excitement of his project:

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‘Even now I cannot recollect, without passion, my reveries while the work was incomplete. I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects’ (180). Frankenstein’s discovery is described in terms of mysticism and illumination, as a ‘magic scene’ (34) that opens upon him ‘at once,’ as a flash of revelatory light: ‘from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me – a light so brilliant and wondrous … that … I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated’ (34). The conception of Frankenstein’s project is dazzling; but when he moves forward to ‘frame’ – literally, embody – his secret, the result, as for Swift, is catastrophic.13 It is the moment of intellectual discovery that is idealized, that elevates and transfigures the artist. But the steps to and from that discovery are described negatively, as ‘darkness’ (34), ‘painful labour’ (34), and toil. This is in part why the inspiration must be guarded, effectively, for as long a time as possible from materialization. The body that will eventually manifest Frankenstein’s creative brilliance is prepared ‘aside’; Frankenstein describes it as a ‘frame’ (35) for the ‘reception’ (35) of the animation he has the power to bestow. The being that Frankenstein creates is, in other words, important chiefly for enabling the expression of the artist’s power: its ‘materials’ (35, 36) and ‘parts’ (35) are viewed not as integral to the artist’s idea but disjunctively, as irksome vehicles for the expression of the artist’s might. This is why the process of creation is so anguished for Frankenstein: compelled by the excitement of his creative idea, appalled by the activity of creation, the artist engages in an act of masochism that turns the body against the spirit in a way that appears to erode both: Frankenstein describes the chiasmatic effect of such an enterprise in terms that repeatedly suggest the amorality and ascendancy of an imagination remote from ‘natural’ concerns: ‘often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion’ (37). As Paul Sherwin has observed (899), the compulsiveness of such activity suggests a view of art as more a process of painful evacuation or emptying of the self than a form of aesthetic expression.14 Reflecting on his father’s probable disapproval of his deeds, Frankenstein recalls, ‘I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed’ (37). Creation, in this sense, is experienced by Frankenstein as a purgative operation, as an act that antibiotically rids the mind or body of an idea. Under such terms, the art object can have (as indeed, it may have in Frankenstein) only pathological or diagnostic significance.

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Unless the creation of art is regarded in this histological or therapeutic way (in the sense that by allowing the materialization of an idea it can be more expediently expelled), it remains puzzling that Frankenstein, whose primary aim appears to be ‘self-aggrandizement’ (Sherwin 892), should wish to realize his dreams so absolutely. Incarnation seems to be a sine qua non of knowledge, and its necessity is neither questioned nor weighed: Frankenstein, despite his disclaimers, is not impelled to create for any philanthropic reason, nor even for aesthetic ones. He seems, indeed, strangely, to have little imaginative link to the physical world: darkness does not move him, and, as he notes laconically, a churchyard ‘was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm’ (33–4). For those who (like Richardson’s Lovelace) possess no sense of the decorum of the physical, the capacity to create leads without question to the need to create, a need that is personal, urgent, and not moral: Frankenstein does not ask whether he should employ his astonishing power, but how he should exercise it (35). The domestic intrudes here, as it does at many key points in the narrative, to check Frankenstein’s enthusiasm and to remind the reader of what he is jeopardizing by his sacrilegious toil: the son recalls his father’s warning about not writing and experiences in so doing a sense of guilt (though at the same time he childishly frees himself from self-examination by assigning the supervisory role to his elder). The point here is that the artistic and the domestic cannot merge, in part because both evade the compelling moral question: Frankenstein (as he does throughout the novel) shifts the burden of moral examination to his father, and the older Frankenstein is prevented from acting by his distance from his child: his letters (though Frankenstein ‘[knows] well, what [are his] feelings’ [37]) contain ‘no reproach’ (38). Both, as if by some sort of conspiracy of languor, allow Frankenstein’s toil to continue. Shelley’s stance on the apparent incompatibility of art and hearth is made more complicated as at this stage of the novel she has Frankenstein utter (in a voice that hardly seems his) a moral pronouncement that exaggeratedly pits the passions of scientific inquiry against the (insipid) pleasures of home: A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with

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the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. (37–8)

Such a lesson does little more than exacerbate the rent between familial and aspirational for which Shelley appears to fault Frankenstein from the very beginning. (Defoe, similarly preoccupied with the relationship between ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ stations of life, is less sure about this issue.) Divided from his family, occupying a ‘cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase’ (36), working in disjunction with diurnal and seasonal cycles, and ‘shun[ning] [his] fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime’ (214 [1831]) – the scientist later speaks of this period of his life as ‘unsocial’ and ‘selfish’ (50–1) – Frankenstein takes his own direction both in the worlds of space and time and in the moral domain to which these worlds are inextricably attached. Though he likens his deeds to those of a criminal (and hence evaluates his position socially, at least in retrospect), ultimately he perceives no real ethical consequences of his actions: the creation will be completed and then life will resume its normal course (but these results are not viewed conjunctively except insofar as they will be more or less simultaneous or sequential in time). The pattern of separation is repeated and magnified in the creation of the monster’s mate, when Frankenstein, leaving his travelling companion, isolates himself on an island in the Orkneys to accomplish his loathsome task. When the sacrilege becomes conscious (and the creation unecstatic), the themes of enslavement and curse (naturally) become more pronounced. The activity, devoid of idealization, becomes, too, more purely – and hence repellently – physical: During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands. (137)

The creation of art, now completely manual, threatens to become, as Frankenstein contemplates the consequences of his deed, mechanical, able, eventually, to replicate itself without the intervention of the artist (as the Creatures will take over the job of reproduction). Frankenstein’s struggle to reassert his ego (he shudders ‘to think that future ages might curse me as their pest’ [138]) may be, as in the instance of the first creation, important to him mainly as an issue of authority, and only coincidentally moral. He does not demonstrate the sympathy towards the Creature that would validate such a claim.

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Desire materialized is incontrovertible and irreversible. Once the act of creation is complete, Frankenstein can no more erase it than he can ‘sport … with life’ (77) (indeed, in this particular case, these actions would be one and the same). The rapture of creation gives way to the burden of responsibility; Frankenstein, once master, now, in Hegelian dialectic, becomes the slave, but with the additional onus of insupportable guilt. Frankenstein thus speaks of a complete ‘overthrow’ (40) of mood after the creation. Seeking the solitude and freedom he enjoyed (?) as a creator, both detached from and also paradoxically fused to his creature, he is now driven with a vengeance into the civil world, the world of responsibility, as an instrument of death and destruction to that world. Shelley displays considerable ambivalence about this sphere, its restrictions and banality highlighted significantly by the grandeur she sees both in solitude and in agony. Frankenstein disappoints at this critical stage in the novel, not only because his solution to the need for penance (for his artistic deed must be atoned for in the civic world) is self-centred and childishly demanding (he falls sick and is nursed by Clerval), but also because the language of fiscal repayment (tellingly absent from his exalted, if agonized period of creation) intrudes dismally to mark a certain distaste for the woodenness of domestic reciprocity, in which moral, personal, or emotional states are conceived in the bourgeois terms of payment and debt: ‘Dearest Clerval,’ Frankenstein exclaims, ‘how kind, how very good you are to me. This whole winter, instead of being spent in study, as you promised yourself, has been consumed in my sick room. How shall I ever repay you? I feel the greatest remorse for the disappointment of which I have been the occasion; but you will forgive me’ (44; emphasis added).15 When these terms appear again, in the Creature’s charge to Frankenstein at the summit of Montanvert, they have achieved an exalted, if melodramatic, tone: ‘Do your duty towards me,’ the Creature exclaims to his creator, ‘and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends’ (77). Conditions, covenants, reciprocal duties, conditional agreements trivialize and degrade the spontaneous reciprocity of parent and child. The legalistic here, as for the judicial system throughout Frankenstein, becomes the refuge of the emotionless – and even, paradoxically, of the amoral – standing in for the more complex emotional attitude that could have forestalled the tragedy.16 The case is similar with the creation of the female monster: Frankenstein projects that when his work is complete, he will be restored to his family, ‘claim Elizabeth, and forget the past in [his] union with her’ (224 [1831]). ‘Cancellation’ of this kind is temporally and logically impossible, as the dream

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and the tone of the monster in delivering his ultimatum in part suggest. Consequences cannot be reduced to a single point in time or restricted exclusively to the self, not only because Frankenstein’s self has become exfoliated in a fundamental way, but also because Shelley’s scientist is placed in a network of human associations that dictate that his actions will have a significant impact on the lives of others. Issues of gender (which continue to be central to Frankenstein scholarship) are a particular province for the ‘distilling’ tendency that excites the scientist to action and that perpetuates his moral error. As Kate Ellis has noted, separation of activities along gender lines is a characteristic of the bourgeois family that Shelley seems to question (124): males keep separate from females, parents from children, public from domestic in ‘fatally polarized worlds’ (Ellis 141) that isolate Victor from the domestic consequences of his actions (and also from his salvation). One might think, given the relative bodilessness of women in Victor Frankenstein’s world17 and their orientation towards self-sacrifice (seen particularly in Caroline’s devotion to her father, and later to the ailing Elizabeth, an ideal memorialized in the family portrait, which shows Caroline ‘in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father’ [58]; Elizabeth’s similar dedication to the activities and needs of the Frankenstein males,18 her selfless willingness to relinquish her claims on Victor’s affections despite her love for him), that they would not threaten the man of science with either their difference or their literality: as mere intellectual constructs and extensions of the men they serve, their appropriation would seem to be relatively painless.19 Elizabeth is, in fact, introduced in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein into the Frankenstein household as a ‘present’ for Victor (207 [1831]), and she is called by him ‘mine … mine … a possession of my own … mine’ (207 [1831]). Yet because such appropriation – with its attendant sentimentalization and spiritualization – necessarily suppresses fleshliness (see Joseph, ‘Frankenstein’s Dream’ 104), the moment of assimilation usually results in a dramatic and unsettling shift to the physical: Frankenstein’s embrace of Elizabeth in the dream following the creation of the monster results not only in her death, but also in her even more traumatic and telling transformation into Victor’s dead – and graphically decaying – mother, and Victor and Elizabeth’s wedding night perversely sees not a tender consummation of their love but the vicious murder of Frankenstein’s bride. In both of these cases, and especially in the dream, the merging of physical and spiritual realms is the site of radical inversions and taboos (see Sherwin 887–8). Marital union is equivalent to death in Victor’s eyes and he anticipates the ceremony explicitly as the moment of his own doom (162), the ‘consummat[ion]’ of the monster’s crimes (159).

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Frankenstein’s fear of the body is, of course, exacerbated, particularly in the edition of 1831, by his extreme sentimentalization and idealization of his childhood. In detailing his early history to Walton, he dwells pointedly and feelingly on the romance of his parents, emphasizing his mother’s frailty – he speaks of her ‘weakened frame,’ her ‘shaken’ health, and the need to shelter her from the ‘rough’ elements (204 [1831]) – and his parents’ moral and bodiless relationship. Their union is idealized into a marriage of devotion that is curiously and unrealistically weighed and controlled, a union whose terms are those of duty rather than passion, with the husband actively disbursing and the wife passively deserving and receiving: There was a sense of justice in my father’s upright mind, which rendered it necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly. Perhaps during former years he had suffered from the late-discovered unworthiness of one beloved, and so was disposed to set a greater value on tried worth. There was a share of gratitude and worship in his attachment to my mother, differing wholly from the doating fondness of age, for it was inspired by reverence for her virtues, and a desire to be the means of, in some degree, recompensing her for the sorrows she had endured, but which gave inexpressible grace to his behaviour to her. (204 [1831; emphasis added])20

In locating this perfect relationship in the past and cementing his role in it as that of the pampered child – ‘their plaything and their idol … their child’ (205 [1831]) – and immobilizing himself further by implicating himself in the rigidly moral web of obligations that he thinks characterizes their relationship (he speaks of their actions as dictated by a ‘deep consciousness of what they owed’ towards him [205 [1831], of their ‘duties’ towards him [205 [1831]), Frankenstein certifies an engagement in the past and in an infantile role that must interfere with the development of all, especially sexual, passion.21 This commitment becomes especially confusing (and restricting) with Elizabeth’s involvement in the scheme. On her deathbed, Frankenstein’s mother joins their hands and speaks of their union as Victor’s father’s consolation while simultaneously assigning her maternal role to her son’s intended bride (26). Elizabeth, at once cousin, sister, mother, and bride, becomes at a stroke the ultimate object of desire and taboo. Covenants and legal agreements, again, as for Defoe and Inchbald, produce and mask emotional complexities of the most agonizing kind. Frankenstein’s copying of his parents’ template of emotional-moral equivalences marks his early relationship with Elizabeth. His descriptions of their upbringing (extensively revised by Shelley for the 1831 edition) are characterized by the same attention to balance:

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We were strangers to any species of disunion and dispute; for although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, there was an harmony in that very dissimilitude. I was more calm and philosophical than my companion; yet my temper was not so yielding. My application was of longer endurance; but it was not so severe whilst it endured. I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aërial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own. (21) Harmony was the soul of our companionship, and the diversity and contrast that subsisted in our characters drew us nearer together. Elizabeth was of a calmer and more concentrated disposition; but, with all my ardour, I was capable of a more intense application, and was more deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge … While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes. (207–8 [1831])

But, as if to suggest that such categorizing is in fact unrealistically schematic (just as Elizabeth and Victor are not truly opposites), Victor’s portrayal of his relationship with Elizabeth gradually and significantly becomes diffused into descriptions of his friendship with Clerval, further rhapsodizing about his childhood (by which he means his friendship to his parents),22 and growing and strangely non-censorious admissions of his own compulsiveness and eagerness to know. That Victor continues to find his memories of childhood ‘exquisite’ (an assessment added in 1831 [Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Rieger 237]) – though they clearly reveal his selfishness and his dismissal of the moral world that occupies Clerval, as well as, Lee Zimmerman and Debra Best argue, a paternal abrogation of duty23 – shows that he still idealizes his past and seals it hermetically off from his present. Such a situation ultimately encourages the moral lassitude that results in his monstrous art. The time of consequence is in the past. Simple translation into spatial terms means that Frankenstein’s departure from the land of his birth frees him to act without restraint. Frankenstein makes valiant efforts to repudiate the feminine throughout Shelley’s novel.24 His relationship with Elizabeth (after the inception of his scientific career) is marked by a pattern of resistance: he fails to return or even write to his family in Geneva during the period of the gestation of the monster, and feels after its creation that his nearness to his loved ones is a contaminant; obscurely, but significantly, Victor’s association with the family seals the family’s doom. As the threats of the monster become more compelling, the resistance to Elizabeth increases: Victor’s response to his father’s proposal that they marry is one of ‘trembl[ing]’ (he mistakes the prelude of his remarks for

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an attempt to unearth the secret of the monster [125]), of ‘horror and dismay’ (126), and it prompts a long tour to England with Henry. The wedding night itself is referred to in prospect as ‘a deadly struggle’ (159), ‘dreadful’ (165). The Creature here has not simply, as the object of Frankenstein’s obsession, become Elizabeth’s most serious competitor; all ‘bodily’ issues are referred to it, dichotomized from the spiritual Elizabeth. If Victor Frankenstein’s resistance to things female is chiefly a fear of embodiment (an embodiment that will implicate him in a specifically sexual and social way), it is fitting that his attempt to ignore the feminine should be punished by his own creation of an offspring whose monstrosity is first and foremost physical. (The Creature, though born with a moral sense, eventually loses that sense to a more atavistic self, as the De Lacey episode and the human encounters preceding it so sadly show.) The shock is also an artistic one: the beauty of ‘the dream’ (39) is replaced by the horror of the object; the imaginative ideal, materialized, becomes ‘loathsome’ (37). Frankenstein, who describes his activities as those of an artist, creates not art, but an object – the negation of art – an object because its internal relationships, its syntax, as it were, fails. Frankenstein is troubled, from the beginning, by the arrangement of ‘parts’ (35), so much so that the ‘whole’ creation never seems to be envisioned by him; when the Creature is animated, the ‘proportion’ and ‘beauty’ of the parts (39) seem, curiously, not to have guaranteed coherence or beauty: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (39)25

(The Creature, interestingly, is never given an objective, cohesive description in the novel.) In elucidating Frankenstein’s hapless enmirement in the physical and his focus on the object-part (ironic in view of his detachment from the object in theory), Shelley suggests a pathological, Othello-like impulse to ‘prove’ his own ideas, an impulse that is at once reductive, self-centred, and self-destructive. Neither Othello nor Frankenstein is enfranchised by such endeavours, but is enslaved to them. The moment of the Creature’s creation marks the end of Frankenstein’s freedom, as the repeated references to his bondage to his project suggest (38, 126, 127, 134, 140, 159). For the certainty

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of the Creature’s engenderment, art is destroyed (as are human beings through the Art-Monster). Longing for a kind of ‘transparent’ creation, in which the art object, as Plato hoped, would reflect the ‘real’ idea (the attainment of immortality, the purification of the human body from disease), Frankenstein unluckily creates an object whose opacity, whose insistent physicality seems, frighteningly, to deny any possibility of semantic translation.26 It is not, perhaps, idealism that Shelley objects to so strenuously (as has been argued by, among others, Cantor [108–9, 115–19]; Joseph, ‘Frankenstein’s Dream’; Fleck), but the process of transformation, of transfiguration, as it were, that discourages and repels her. Her discussion of authorship in the introduction to the Standard Novels edition of 1831 places marked stress on the disappointments of the creative process: complaining about her inability to produce anything but commonplace pieces, she cites her childhood preference for ‘dreams’ over ‘writings’ (192), for ‘fancy’ over the productions of her pen: ‘My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings … my dreams were all my own’ (192).27 It is the ‘the airy flights of [her] imagination’ that Shelley calls her ‘true compositions’ (193). Such protestations are, certainly, the conventional ones of the woman’s struggle for figuration, of the female artist deprecating her own art. But just as the night vision at Villa Diodati of the scientist at the side of his ‘odious handywork’ is an analogue to Mary Shelley’s own creation of Frankenstein (196 [1831]), the sentiments bear an uncomfortable resemblance to her protagonist’s preference for the intellectual and abstract, and the physical act of creation itself is repeatedly described in words that associate manual craft with desecration, violation, and torture (33–4, 36–7). Yet that idealism is also made ridiculous: most obviously in Walton and in Victor’s early attachment to the outmoded Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. As if to confirm this ambivalent relationship to the literal, Shelley constructs Frankenstein as a tale with a high degree of narrativity, with a constant emphasis on audition rather than spectacle: ‘Hear me’ is the repeated charge of both Frankenstein and his creature.28 It is difficult to visualize (and hence, as Swingle [55] has argued, in a more comprehensive sense, to ‘know’) the monster, not because (as Mellor has suggested [131–3]) Shelley intended to make him ‘sublime’ (hence indescribable in Burke’s sense of the term), but because, more simply, the physical descriptions of him repeatedly lack impact and precision: Murray notes ‘the … deadening repetition of devil words used to describe the monster’ (58), and, indeed, Shelley works with a highly limited range of adjectives of physical description: ‘filthy,’ ‘distorted,’ ‘deformed,’ and ‘hideous’ recur with unrelieved and rather pallid regularity. Frankenstein, in an audial recreation of the Creature’s voyeuristic position in the De Laceys’ lean-to, hears the tale of William’s murder (through a letter from his father) and Justine’s viola-

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tion (in a recapitulation by Ernest), and the murder of Clerval also takes place offstage. And, of course, all the novel’s central events are diffused through Victor’s narration to Walton. Though such narrative displacement recreates the reader’s position in any tale, the multiplicity of frames and Shelley’s repeated retreat from the portrayal of acts in the present (even Elizabeth’s murder is not directly witnessed) lend a curiously artificial air to the events of the novel.29 Frankenstein’s tendency rhetorically to elevate his moments of physical confrontation with the monster (in particular evidence in his vaunting at Chamounix: ‘stay, that I may trample you to dust! … Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must fall’ [77–8]) not only points to the insufficiency of melodramatic discourse in the face of a largely psychological threat – showing, equally, Shelley’s cynicism about heroic male posturing – but also reveals the degree to which Frankenstein’s physical experiences are consistently uprooted from space, transferred backwards to a figurative plane: his reflections on the ‘fearfulness of the expected combat’ on his wedding night lead him, in a demonstration of utter physical illogicality, to give the order to his wife to retire, the order that sends her to her death. (Here, of course, depending upon the manner in which the ‘combat’ is taken, Frankenstein’s order is perfectly logical and his ‘logic’ satisfactory.) The ‘muting’ of physical action – as in the transference of all the novel’s sexual activity to the realm of rhetoric30 – duplicates Frankenstein’s own revulsion at the physical and its ambivalent status in the creation of art. When space is allowed to come into its own at the chronological end of the novel, it has achieved a faceless, Arctic, agoraphobic quality, as a frighteningly dimensionless backdrop for signs of a purely idiomatic and private significance. Though it ‘suggests’ Frankenstein’s spiritual bleakness (and the futility of Walton’s quest) it does not participate in its meaning. If life is impure because it has to do with enactments of desire, if art is impure because it requires the embodiment of ideas, then it becomes all the more crucial to deal with the art of living and the production of art morally. This is where Frankenstein fails. For if Shelley, perplexingly, agrees with her protagonist that the physicalization of the imagination, of the ideal, is disgusting and hazardous (the link recalls Swift), it must (because of the inevitability of birth and of art) nonetheless be dealt with, not abstractly, but concretely, and, because concretized, in an essentially ‘social’ or ethical context. This imperative is all the more compelling if, as Mary Poovey argues (Proper Lady 123), the imagination is appetitive, requiring social and especially domestic control to prevent its destructive projection into the ‘natural’ world. Here, Shelley divides clearly from the main actor of her drama, faulting Frankenstein for his moral evasions; his rationalizing; his cowardice at the trial of Justine (a trait thrown into relief by Elizabeth’s spontaneous admission of guilt at

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William’s death); his protracted silence about his complicity in the monster’s career of destruction and murder; his shifting of self-blame (underscored in the edition of 1831) to the abstract plane of ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’; and his refusal, even as he reviews the catalogue of his crimes, to take responsibility for his actions. The Creature’s early innate moral sense is clearly stressed to throw such sophistications of ethics into relief; his ingenuous responses to goodness and wickedness contrast strikingly with Frankenstein’s convoluted, vague, and self-punishing speeches about complicity and guilt and with his tendency to vaunt his own agony.31 Frankenstein’s propensity for sleep after the creation of both monsters and ‘fits’ (at Clerval’s visit, at Elizabeth’s death), for bouts of illness and madness (after Clerval’s death and at the demise of his father), as well as his repeated portrayal of himself as the one who suffers most (‘The poor victim,’ he says of Justine, ‘… felt not as I did, such deep and bitter agony’ [67]), highlights his determination to avert blame for what he has done. In such instances, oddly, the physical closes in on him (almost involuntarily), as if in retribution for his unwillingness to deal with the consequences of his acts.32 The ‘proper’ ethics that might correct such courses are not, however (in contrast to Jane Eyre) of the body. The Creature’s evil is signified corporeally, by his deformed appearance. Though his conjunction with the ethereal Elizabeth is not described in such a way as to produce the physical shock it might (as noted above, Shelley significantly avoids describing the confrontation directly), the De Laceys, as well as his more casual contacts, abhor and avoid him because of his appearance, impelling by the Creature’s own analysis his degeneration into an antisocial and anti-moral being. Shelley here, confusingly, uses the corporeal as a signifier of the moral (the Creature’s deformity mirrors his own wickedness and Frankenstein’s blasphemy; Elizabeth’s beauty is a sign of her spiritual purity), and yet the moral and the physical never in her novel truly conjoin: the drama operates at a remove from any sustained or direct ethical commentary or tone. The bewilderment of many of Frankenstein’s first reviewers as to whether the novel contained a moral33 is perhaps testimony to this problematic disjunction. So that though Frankenstein seems to be a moral treatise on right living, exhorting man to moral action (or inaction), such a program is curiously divorced from its own action. Shelley’s overt statements about human ambition are not only deliberately flawed (coming from the mouth of the untrustworthy and revisionary Frankenstein)34 but also afterthe-fact. That is, once the deed of creation is performed, Frankenstein’s situation is impossible, by strict moral standards, to rectify. To kill the Creature, as the Creature himself sardonically charges his creator, is to ‘sport … with life’ (77) – a charge that is both horribly true and, voiced by one who defies its dictates, excoriatingly false. To allow him to live (on his terms, with another of

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his kind) is to risk a further course of malignity and destruction (138). Such a dilemma speaks to the frightening and ultimately disappointing autonomy of the art object and to the moral agony of compromise; and, though this predicament is insoluble in theory, it may (and must, as Milton knew) be resolved in a civic sphere. As the epitome of the antisocial artist, roving the spectacular Arctic wastes in search of his demonic double, Frankenstein, however, ‘impresario’ to the end (Morton 51), seeks the solution outside the polis, the arena in which, in civilized society, ethical conduct both occurs and is judged. And the terms of the combat, far from being construed morally, have by this stage turned solely personal, idiosyncratic: creature and creator desire each other’s demise from motives of a revenge so fierce that it has driven them to the edges of the natural world. Inchbald might have recognized such a setting and the nature of such a conflict; Fielding assuredly would not have done so, nor would he have countenanced the renunciation of responsibility to cast it in broader, ethical terms. The moral imperatives of Shelley’s novel – her concerns about the translation of ideas into art and about the legacy of the art object – sunder again from the larger design, engulfed in melodrama and effect.

Epilogue

If, during the crucial period of its development, the eighteenth-century English novel assigns increasing weight to both narrative (plot) and verisimilitude (of setting and of character), it does so only through a concerted grappling with the problem of the body and with the nature and validity of embodied meaning. Towards such concepts eighteenth-century novelists display pronounced ambivalence. A suspicion of the body, rooted in a Protestant recoil from the fleshly and the fallen, marks the novel throughout most of the century. Body and soul continue their acerbic (sometimes absurd, sometimes scarifying) dialogues as characters attempt to wrest dignity and agency from an increasingly realistic platform. As that platform becomes more obtrusive, eighteenth-century characters assert their presence less by way of a projection through conversion narratives or myth, and less by way of deflection through the intellectual lenses of their creators, than through a ‘pac[ing] forth’ (to paraphrase Shakespeare, Sonnet 55) into a ‘realized’ world with which they are forced to grapple and in which to varying extents they must embody their deepest hopes and desires. As eighteenth-century characters put on more bodily and psychological ‘weight,’ and chart a more fluid course through their authors’ ideological worlds, the fractive pressures between the authors’ didactic programs and the increasingly mimetic prerogatives of the genre diminish, the gradually reducing friction that these elements exert on each other becoming a telling barometer of the novel’s increasing coherence and sophistication. Swift and Defoe, delineating the imaginative stakes clearly, emerge as less recognizably ‘novelistic’ writers in this sense than Richardson and Fielding, in part because their protagonists (Gulliver, Crusoe) bend under the weight of their creators’ ideological agendas, their ‘selves’ emerging not in predominantly bodily ways but in intellectual ones. Such disjunctive presentations of character are not as extreme as they are in Defoe’s predecessor Bunyan, for whom self (though not, significantly,

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art) is constituted subtractively and divisively through a process of divestment from the body and its passions. The heavenly rewards offered to Defoe’s characters are more tangible and their expression more material than those in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the work that in highly and significantly paradoxical ways serves as the prototype for the genre in England. Defoe’s and Swift’s disease with matters corporeal suggests a great deal about the centrality of embodied ideas and characters to the novel form. A kind of bipartisanship is necessary to the novelistic experience. The more remote the author, and the more dislocated the dramatic, performing character from the narrative plan or program, the less a novel ‘feels’ novelistic (rather, it may appear doctrinal, satiric, allegorical). That the body is of paramount importance in the early stages of the novel’s gestation is made clear not only, therefore, by early writers’ uneasy preoccupation with the dramatic or performative in early fiction (is Crusoe cured by the tobacco or the Bible, and why is this question important, if unanswerable, in Defoe’s novel?), but also by the way that it lingers as a concerted moral focal point (for Richardson and, though quite differently, for Fielding) as questions about the legitimacy of the novel’s expressive form and focus, raised explicitly by Puritan writers such as Bunyan and Defoe, dissipate. That the issues recur in Inchbald’s ‘overly embodied’ heroine Miss Milner (and her sentimental predecessors) shows early novelists courting and shrinking away from the extremes of their expressive art. That this eventually becomes an explicit question of the creative imagination (as indeed it has been implicitly for Defoe and Swift) is made manifest by Frankenstein and by the work of many of Mary Shelley’s Romantic contemporaries, especially Keats and Percy Shelley. For all of these writers, body and soul strain, mostly in vain, for some form of compatibility: Clarissa at the garden gate, pressed forward by Lovelace at the moment that she judges herself for what her body is doing; Frankenstein, shocked at the incarnation of his ideal project; Crusoe, stretching his arms in mechanical gestures towards his creator. In all of these instances, the dislocation of physical and mental is tragic, repellent, and constraining. Enactments of desire take place in a physical sphere, in a social and sexual realm; they play themselves out by definition in some sort of civic space (imagined, as on Crusoe’s island, or real, as in the house of Dorriforth). They must by definition be judged in such terms and measured by their impact on others. That such translations of desire into bodily form appear repeatedly (with the exception of Fielding in Tom Jones) to disappoint and blight those who enact them testifies to the volatility of this project in the period. The problem of the eighteenth-century fictional body, thus, is not exclusively an aesthetic one; it extends itself insistently into critical questions of

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agency (which are also at the centre of the developing genre), as the body facilitates expression too strangely and too easily. Clarissa’s instinctive recoil as the odious Solmes presses his ugly weight against her hoop suggests the charged atmosphere and vulnerability of the physical self and the way in which its vividness complicates, ensnares, and isolates – a paradox that the sentimental novel was compelled finally to confront. Smollett, Sterne, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, among others, all have their distinctive perspectives on bodily issues, and much excellent scholarship on Sterne and Austen in particular (King; Wiltshire) suggests how pervasive these concerns are during the period treated here. If my choice of novels seems unusual, it is because I wish to show, first, how crucial to the developing form was an acknowledgement of the body and its expressive legitimacy, and, second, how (with the grand exception of Fielding in Tom Jones) spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience continue to dominate the period. It is not simply that the body (one’s own and others’) imperils the spiritual enterprise – ‘below’ the soul, in Defoe’s words, its push for mastery must be resisted, for bodily experience is private (Richardson), antisocial (Richardson, Inchbald, Shelley), devoid of intelligence and grace (Defoe, Swift) – but that the role of the body in matters of artistic creation, and in any work of the imagination broadly conceived, is puzzlingly complex. Lovelace’s histrionics in the period are deeply – and rightly – feared. It is as if, generically, he tests the boundaries of the novel to gauge its receptivity to the dramatic, a tone that the genre throughout its history both courts and repudiates, resisting the nightmarish, because too deeply theatrical and vertiginous, atmosphere of the ‘blind’ bodies of the masquerade (Fantomina, Amelia). An acceptance of bodily involvement in the creation of art, in the cerebral, discursive – yet also imitative – praxis of the novel, is not an assumption for early novelists in particular, as paradoxical as this might seem, and, even as late as Inchbald, bodily concerns prove to be erosive to many of the contractual features of the creative enterprise. Frankenstein states the dilemma most baldly, and the Romantic writers grapple with it more passionately, both as a question of the self and as a problem of truly imaginative art.

Notes

1 Robinson Crusoe: Discord 1 See further Foster and McKeon, who consider the competing impulses of Defoe’s narrative from different perspectives, Foster arguing that Defoe creates a character who compulsively struggles to free himself from a religious interpretation of his own narrative, McKeon contending that the sacred and the profane are successfully accommodated in a Weberian fable of social and spiritual ambition (315–37). 2 ‘But leaving this Part,’ writes Crusoe after discussing his recovery from sin and guilt during the time of the ague, ‘I return to my Journal’ (71). ‘But to go on’ (119), he says abruptly, terminating a meditation on prayer and returning to his descriptions of his island wanderings. ‘But I must go on with the Historical Part of Things,’ he reminds himself, interrupting a long-winded discussion of the Bible, ‘and take every Part in its order’ (160). The point here is not so much that the ideological and dramatic are discordant as that Defoe clearly has difficulty or little interest in fusing them. 3 Richetti notes that the novel’s spiritual rewards are reaped by those who ‘read with patience’ (Defoe’s Narratives 23). Walter Wilson, an early biographer of Defoe and a church historian of the Dissenters, praised less reticently the easy conjunction of drama and religious morality in Defoe’s work: ‘The fine sentiments that abound in Crusoe, its delicate touches, and pure morality, are not the least parts of its beauties, and give it a decided superiority over every other work of the same description … [H]is lessons of this kind are no where out of place; they are closely interwoven with the story, and are so just … in themselves, that they cannot be passed over, but the attention is irresistibly rivetted to them as an essential part of the narrative’ (3: 442–3). In taking issue with those critics who emphasize Defoe’s moral intent, I am advocating neither a superficial nor an ahistorical reading of Robinson Crusoe. My interest, rather, lies in examining the effect of the pace and tempo of the novel on the reader’s arrangement and ‘ranking’ of the various levels

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4

5

6

7

8 9

10

Notes to pages 6–10 of the narrative. The fact that the ‘myth’ of Robinson Crusoe centres more on Crusoe’s industry and ingenuity than on his spiritual rebirth speaks to the complexity of this question. Maddox stresses the central importance of interpretative reading in Defoe’s novel. In Maddox’s words about the conflicting accounts of Crusoe’s first days on the island, ‘Crusoe’s narrative is perforce a constant recasting of what happened, and [the little conflicts in his accounts] clearly show how the same event takes on different meanings according to the perspective from which it is seen’ (35). But as Crusoe appears to sift, Defoe, paradoxically, accumulates, providing a strange narrative analogue to Crusoe’s rejection/acceptance of the money from the ship: ‘O Drug! Said I aloud … However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away.’ In such instances, as Maddox has so shrewdly remarked (52n7), Defoe unfairly, greedily, gets his cake and eats it too, insisting that the reader look within and simultaneously distracting him by piling on interesting details from without. Eric Jager argues that Crusoe constructs himself primarily in terms of and through language (journals, contracts, talking parrots). When such a transposition occurs at the end of Clarissa (as Richardson subsumes Clarissa’s voice into the documentary paraphernalia of death – the emblems on the coffin, the instructions about burial, the will, Clarissa’s invocations of Scripture – we see a similar shift from an ‘internal’ to an ‘external’ definition of self. See F. Donoghue on the multiple and contradictory political roles that Crusoe assumes towards the end of his island adventure. Donoghue argues, interestingly, that Crusoe’s sometimes desperate improvisations point to his true recognition that power ‘lies elsewhere, outside himself’ (8). The insight has psychological as well as political ramifications. See also Marshall 79–81; McInelly (on Friday’s contribution to Crusoe’s self-image) 16–18; and Schonhorn (on Robinson Crusoe as monarchial fable) 141–64. Richardson’s Lovelace, equally afflicted with a sense of his own powerlessness, demonstrates similar behaviour. Cf. R.D. Laing on the unembodied self (a state of ‘selfness’ that bears a striking resemblance to Crusoe’s at the end of the novel): ‘The individual’s self-relationship becomes a pseudo-interpersonal one, and the self treats the false selves as though they were other people whom it depersonalizes’ (77). Homer O. Brown finds such a procedure a hallmark of Defoe’s novels. The wind and sea treat Crusoe in a similarly imperious fashion, threatening to ‘swallow’ him up (9, 32, 34), ‘carry’ him away, and ‘drive’ him on (32). The waves that land him on the island ‘hurry’ him along, ‘take,’ ‘dash,’ ‘swallow,’ and ‘carry’ him (34–5). In a Christian world, we are reminded, activity and passivity exchange meanings. This shift of valorization, of course, becomes a major stumbling block for the novel as a developing genre. Hunter (Reluctant Pilgrim) offers other examples, including Abraham, Adam, and Solomon.

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11 The problem is reconstituted in the preface to Roxana. As Defoe notes curtly (though not ingenuously), ‘the Foundation of This [Story] is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History’ (1). 12 By the time of Colonel Jack, such claims, interestingly, have become perfunctory: ‘it [is not] of the least Moment to enquire whether the Colonel hath told his own Story true or not; If he has made it a History or a Parable, it will be equally useful, and capable of doing Good; and in that it recommends it self without any other Introduction’ (2). 13 Hardy speaks of ‘the pressure of dogmatism’ in Defoe’s work (51). W. Wilson, in his interesting discussion of Moll Flanders, conceives of the relationship between Moll’s story and its religious inferences in medical terms, Defoe’s moral serving as ‘antidote’ to the ‘poison’ of Moll’s history (3: 490). But in Defoe’s case, poisoner and physician are, self-servingly, one and the same. 14 As Arnold Kettle so complexly remarked, ‘This is Defoe’s strength, that he is able to extricate himself as an artist from conventional morality (even in the very act of paying lip-service to it) and to concentrate on the surface-texture of life. And his limitation is that he has no other morality to put in its place’ (1: 61–2). 15 See also Sir Walter Scott on the structure of Defoe’s fictional narratives: ‘the incidents are huddled together like paving-stones discharged from a cart, and have as little connexion between the one and the other. The scenes merely follow, without at all depending on each other. They are not like those of the regular drama, connected together by a regular commencement, continuation, and conclusion, but rather resemble the pictures in a showman’s box, which have no relation further than as being enclosed within the same box, and subjected to the action of the same string’ (‘Daniel Defoe’ 172). 16 Such metaphors recall Minto’s remarks on the structure of Moll Flanders: ‘it might be cut into pieces, each capable of wriggling amusingly by itself’ (141). 17 Fielding’s attention to formal balance (as well as his deployment of an urbanely elevated narrative voice) in Tom Jones provide a telling contrast to Defoe’s earnest syntactic bushwhacking. 18 Schmidgen assesses this aspect of Defoe’s descriptive style in economic terms, commenting on Defoe’s tendency to ‘[dislodge objects] from their social ground’ to the extent that Defoe’s lists become embodiments of ‘a kind of degree zero of description,’ erasing ‘human presence [in favour of] a reifying cultivation of exclusive relationships among things’ (108). But as Leslie Stephen noted, there is a point at which ‘prosaic accuracy of detail’ itself, paradoxically, becomes poetic (‘De Foe’s Novels’ 39). 19 Alter discusses this distrust of the poetic in Moll Flanders and connects it with a mercantile outlook (Rogue’s Progress 40–4). Starr argues, against Gray, that Crusoe’s observations are infused with subjectivity, and that interpretation and analysis are central to his style (‘Defoe’s Prose Style: 1’).

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Notes to pages 16–23

20 Such a program, interestingly, forecasts Robbe-Grillet’s radical desire to strip from literary objects the ‘suspect interiority’ conferred on them by conventional novelists, to free them from the romantic ‘tyranny of significations’ (21–2). 21 See James 167–9. James discusses this device as reproductive of Crusoe’s anxiety and indecisiveness on the island, and later of his desire to ‘verbally civilize’ or dignify his surroundings (172–3). 22 This paradox of self-distance and self-protection, along with the literalization of (ego) boundaries provoked by fear of eruptive (emotional) events, have striking parallels in fascistic self-representations. (See Theweleit.) 23 See Schmidgen on the importance of boundaries in Robinson Crusoe. Schmidgen examines Crusoe’s ‘centrifugal self-extension’ on the island as an ‘act of incorporation’ (or appropriation) analogous to (or correcting) the ingestive threats of the cannibals (59–61). Crusoe perhaps recognizes himself in the cannibal ‘other’ most arrestingly in the episode of the footprint, when he measures the strange impression against his own foot, an act that aligns Crusoe’s activities with those of the savages and explodes any notion of ownership (insofar as ownership is construed as an extension of self into space). 24 Wheeler offers some answers to these questions (79–80) that have to do with a collapse and hence a complication of racial differences in the novel. 25 Such a situation, of course, from a conventional spiritual point of view, makes the soul more receptive to God. See Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim 42, 163, 165. As Colonel Jack jovially remarks, there is nothing like a ‘violent Fit of the Gout’ to ‘[clear] the Head, [restore] the Memory, and [Qualify] us to make the most, and just, and useful Remarks upon our own Actions’ (307). 26 Here is Crusoe’s description of the filial welcome: ‘Friday kiss’d him, embrac’d him, hugg’d him, cry’d, laugh’d, hollow’d, jump’d about, danc’d, sung, then cry’d again, wrung his Hands, beat his own Face, and Head, and then sung, and jump’d about again, like a distracted Creature’ (172). As Crusoe says, unconvincingly, ‘it would have mov’d any one to Tears’ (172). 27 Defoe repeatedly in his works calls attention to the difficulty of portraying strong emotions: ‘It is not in the power of Art … not Words,’ he says of the task of representing the agony of a man awaiting sentencing. ‘Language is deficient; nothing can Express it’ ([‘Portraiture of the Miseries of a Traitor’] 124). See Novak, ‘The Unmentionable and the Ineffable.’ 28 See [‘Portraiture of the Miseries of a Traitor’] 125. The threat of syncope (or worse) accompanies all moments of high emotion in Defoe’s fiction. Reflecting on her terrors at her sea-crossing from France, Roxana records, ‘my Thoughts got no Vent, as Amy’s did; I had a silent sullen kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either in Words or Tears, and which was, therefore, much the worse to bear’ (129). See also the muteness of the Quaker in response to Roxana’s offer of financial

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security (253–4) and Colonel Jack’s description of the ‘heaviness [of] Soul’ (rendered literally, as ‘a kind of a Dead Lump’ upon his Heart [165]) brought on by his tutor’s penitential reflections on his misspent life. This brilliant figure, suggestive of the way frames of reference shift in Robinson Crusoe, is Tournier’s, and occurs in the context of Robinson’s journal meditations on the relationship of self to other, subject to object, on Speranza (82–4). Maddox speaks suggestively in this regard of Crusoe’s ‘vampirism’ (45). He appears, indeed, to ‘fix’ or freeze events at their literal level and then suck the lifeblood out of them. He does this in his lengthy record of the sufferers on board ship in Farther Adventures (12: 127–31); in his Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, Defoe comments explicitly upon the limits of such one-dimensional depictions: ‘It is observ’d by the Curious, that the most difficult thing in the Limners Art is, to represent a Person singing; suppose it be the Picture of a young Lady, the utmost he can do is, to shew her Countenance bright, the Company listening, and appearing pleased; but alas towards the Sound, towards the Charm of her Voice, and the Beauty of her Judgment, he can do no more than paint her with her Mouth open, which is the meanest Posture she can, with Decency, be shewn in; and unless the other Passions discover it, she may as well be supposed to be swearing, scolding, sick, or any thing else, as well as singing’ (iv). Noteworthy here is how an absence of empathy in the viewer guarantees a picture that is devoid of grace. The shadow-theatre presentation of the conversion of Will Atkins’s wife in Farther Adventures (13: 37–9) is another case in point. The ossification of such moments may also be a result of their overcodification, as in the formulae of Charles Le Brun; Defoe may have owned a copy of Conférence … sur l’expression générale et particulière. (See The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell 65, item 1024.) Stein, in his spirited anti-reading of Robinson Crusoe, sees Crusoe’s physical exertions on the island as bumbling and crude, showing Crusoe to be a clod and a dunce, which reading he insists is controlled by Defoe (citing, among other examples, the ridiculous project of the boat). Robins takes a more moderate stance on the issue of Crusoe’s physical (and mental) limitations. That Defoe’s work invites such mutually exclusive readings is testimony to the fact that Crusoe’s ‘character’ is related more properly to (is, perhaps, more accurately a projection of) ideas of myth and history than to those of existential psychology. Richardson, interestingly, will find himself challenged by this same antithetical relationship of the acting body and the reflective self. The term is Watt’s (‘Defoe as Novelist’ 157). Homer O. Brown regards all Defoe’s novels as based on that precept. Hazlitt might argue that the distinction is moot: ‘[Defoe’s] own impressions of whatever he chose to conceive,’ he wrote, ‘are so vivid and literal, as almost to

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confound the distinction between reality and imagination’ (‘Wilson’s Life and Times’ 390). But that is to beg the question. 34 Indeed, Birdsall (and others) suggest that, in contrast to Swift, Defoe is kept from greatness by a lack of idealism. His heroes and heroines are more concerned with survival than with principle. See Birdsall 16–17. 35 As Vickers has intimated, Crusoe’s realm (and Defoe’s) is (Baconian) science, not art. 36 To Defoe, such dissolution would be disastrous. The footprint is arresting because it defies Defoe’s usual urge towards ‘outline,’ simultaneously fusing past and present, monistic and binary, presence and absence; it ‘represents’ in a way that is conceptually alien to Crusoe. All Defoe’s novels examine this threat sociologically. His characters are ‘all single separate molecules, shifting to and fro in the wide sands of life – touching others, but never for a moment incorporated with them’ (Roscoe 400). This view – essentially a Hobbesian one of isolation in the self, with the attendant emotions of fear and monomania – is reiterated by many later commentators on Defoe, notably Homer O. Brown and Birdsall. Formulations that posit Crusoe as fearful of engulfment by others seem far more interesting than political readings that cast Crusoe’s alarms as mainly imperialistic. Both views, however, have Crusoe at a kind of negative fulcrum: ‘Crusoe’s anxiety [about being devoured],’ writes Daniel Cottom, ‘is so strong because the psychology of empire demands that any creature or influence that one cannot master must be seen as a voracious intruder on one’s potency’ (‘Robinson Crusoe’ 282). Crusoe’s recurrent dread of being consumed is here raised to a higher, metaphysical level. Clearly, when self-protection is at a premium and fear regnant, the climate is not ideal for the creation of art. 2 Gulliver’s Travels: Shock 1 On the problem of text(s) in Gulliver’s Travels, see, among others, Castle (‘Why the Houyhnhnms Don’t Write’), Rodino (‘“Splendide Mendax”’), Holly, and Probyn. 2 ‘Soft school’ and ‘hard school’ critics disagree about the function of Don Pedro: soft school critics (most notably, Williams, Jonathan Swift 203–5; Ross, ‘Final Comedy’ 194) argue that Don Pedro embodies the idea of exemplary and normative human behaviour; hard school critics maintain that Don Pedro is too minor a character to counterbalance the demolition of human nature that has been performed in Part Four. According to Géracht, the Don Pedro episode exhibits significant parallels to the tale of the Samaritan. For a dissenting view to the ‘Don Pedro syndrome,’ see Fekete, who argues that Don Pedro, in his coercive altruism, reveals that ‘the social interactions of even the most rational and civilized of men are based in violence, coercion, intolerance, paternalism, and hypocrisy’ (31).

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3 Another reason for the early critical ‘invisibility’ of Don Pedro is that a recommendation for compromise does not fit the traditional view of Swift as violent and punitive. Repeatedly, Swift is viewed by his critics as lashman and swordsman: he is the ‘scourge’ of the ministry (Anonymous, Journal Anglais 199), a ‘gladiator’ (Orrery 125); he ‘whip[s]’ (Lyttelton 31) and ‘lash[es]’ (D. Swift 216); he ‘scorch[es]’ (Thackeray 28); ‘his Rod … draws blood at every stroke’ (Lyttelton 32). (Thackeray, denigrating his armoury in keeping with his view of Swift as cowardly, degraded, and mad, spoke of him doing his business with ‘a dirty bludgeon’ [8], or a ‘bone’ [30].) ‘Disregarding all the laws of polished hostility,’ writes Jeffrey, ‘he uses, at one and the same moment, his sword and his poisoned dagger – his hands and his teeth, and his envenomed breath, – and … upon occasion … discharging on his unhappy victims a shower of filth, from which neither courage nor dexterity can afford any protection’ (45). The image of Swift as indiscriminate warrior, tearing with ‘fierce … beak and talon’ (Thackeray 13), is related to that of Swift as a menacing physician, administering ‘emeticks’ and ‘nauseous … drugs’ (Delany 198), preferring ‘caustics … to softer balsamics’ (Orrery 125) in order that he may ‘erode proud flesh’ (Orrery 125), or as a frightening surgeon, as eager to inflict pain as to heal: ‘he tears the bandages from their wounds … and applies the incision knife and caustic with salutary, but rough and untamed severity’ (Scott, Works of Swift 7: 404). Even after we succumb to such ‘harsh medicine’ (Scott, Works of Swift 7: 404), Dr Swift carries on as a kind of demonic vivisector, ‘exposing the worst parts of our nature with the art of an anatomist dissecting a mangled and half-putrid carcase’ (Scott, Works of Swift 11: 11). The analogy of satirist to surgeon is telling, for, as in the old medical joke, the decease of the patient may simply be an inconvenient by-product of a successful operation, one that may, in effect, be of little concern to Swift. 4 Gulliver’s shifting role as spokesman for Swift and as butt of his satire (as well as, of course, the absurd adventures and kaleidoscopic changes of size to which he is subjected) have led many critics to be wary of treating him as a character in a novelistic sense. If Gulliver’s incoherence as a character is not entirely self-made, such a problem merely underlines the volatility of the project in which Swift is engaged. As Swift’s interest in Gulliver’s response to his travels deepens (in Gulliver’s exhibitions of pride, in his behaviour towards Don Pedro) the work becomes more recognizably ‘novelistic.’ 5 On the connections between Swift and Defoe, see, among others, Novak, ‘Swift and Defoe’; Ross, Swift and Defoe; Dennis 122–33. 6 See Horrell on Swift as fiction-writer: ‘Swift possesses most of [Defoe’s fictional talents], but without their center. What Swift lacks is Defoe’s coherence of purpose’ (56). Seidel argues that this rejection of narrative coherence and narratorial interiority is sustained and deliberate.

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7 Byron’s celebration of Swift as consummate rhymster (‘He beats us all hollow,’ he is said to have remarked to Trelawny; ‘his rhymes are wonderful’ [Trelawny 74]) suggests (as does the predilection for offering up [false] choices – big-little, Yahoo-Houyhnhnm) his pleasure in working in ‘twos.’ 8 As Walter Ong argues, Swift’s conceptual tendency is towards isolated systems that are reformed not by adaptation or adjustment, but by purging, asepsis (219): ‘Swift seldom argues energetically and convincingly for reform by adjustment of qualitative elements within a system. The basis of his … appeal … is the cry of the dissatisfied spectator[:] “Throw him out!”’ (219). See also John Traugott’s rejection of the notion of compromise in Swift (‘A Tale’ 125n6). On the absence of choice in Houyhnhnmland, see Orrery 216–17. 9 ‘The reader of the fourth part of “Gulliver’s Travels” is like the hero himself [stifled with filth]. It is Yahoo language: a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene’ (37). 10 For Murry this attitude characterizes Swift’s writing around 1731, a period of Swift’s work distinguished, Murry argues, by ‘peculiarly revolting coarseness’ and an apparent obsession with human excretion (Jonathan Swift 437, 439). A case in point is the curiously detailed Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin (1732), in which heaps of urban excrement are methodically probed and examined and assigned to various national fundaments (Jonathan Swift 438–9). 11 Huxley similarly posited that Swift’s rage stemmed not from man’s bodily nature tout court but from the loathsome union of carnal and spiritual: ‘Swift could not forgive men and women for being vertebrate mammals as well as immortal souls’ (100). 12 Such plays with logic (in this instance, the unexpected reordering of the ‘chain of being’) are typical of Swift, as is his tendency to conceptualize things in a hierarchical way. See England on the subversion of logic in Swift’s poetry. Much of the energy of Part Four consists of trying to ‘locate’ Gulliver in some precise spot ‘between’ or ‘with’ the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. See Crane on Swift’s brilliant inversion of the homo est animal rationale syllogism, from which much of the humour and complex irony of the fourth voyage is generated. See also Ehrenpreis, ‘The Meaning of Gulliver’s Last Voyage,’ on the larger questions of human classification and definition to which Swift’s attention to this commonplace gives rise. 13 This is in part the ‘Mr. Ed’ syndrome. Illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels throw this tone of burlesque into relief. 14 ‘When once you have thought of big men and little men,’ Boswell reports Johnson

Notes to pages 41–4

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as having remarked, ‘it is very easy to do all the rest’ (Life of Johnson 2: 319). Thackeray similarly spoke of Swift’s design as ‘the mere process of … logic’ (33). Coleridge also noted Swift’s ‘want of reverence for the original frame of man’ (Aitken). Douglas Lane Patey argues that such disquisitions satirize physico-theological arguments of the period, but that, as usual for Swift, they ‘[cut] two ways’ (829). See Boyle on Gulliver’s phallic preoccupations in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, 34–9. The anxiety of having to urinate in an alien place becomes an issue again in Brobdingnag, and Gulliver is forced to convey his needs to the farmer’s wife through sign language. Eventually he is carried to the garden and left to ‘[discharge] the Necessities of Nature’ between two leaves of sorrel. A long passage defending his portrayal of such particulars (on the basis of their benefit to philosophic thought and ‘publick as well as private Life’ [85]) immediately follows (84–5). This reduction of man’s moral, spiritual, and emotional life to the gross mechanics of bodily emissions and discharges also informs The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and A Tale of a Tub (in particular, the digression concerning madness). Similarly, Gulliver speaks of exercising no mercy upon any Lilliputians who might attempt to kill him as he sleeps (21). Harassed by the ‘Rabble,’ he pretends that he is about to eat one of the offenders alive (26); he waves his scimitar magisterially to and fro before the Emperor and his troops (31); he speaks of himself as ‘prodigious’ (28) and readily translates the moniker Quinbus Flestrin as the ‘Great Man Mountain.’ Swift’s emphasis is repeatedly on what is done to Gulliver. In Part One a violent storm drives his ship onto a rock; he and five crewmembers ‘trusted ourselves to the Mercy of the Waves’ (16). ‘Tired’ and ‘weak’ (17), Gulliver penetrates into Lilliput, and then awakens tied to the ground, ‘not able to stir’ (17). His arms and legs are ‘strongly fastened on each Side to the Ground’ (17), his hair affixed in the same manner, and he is secured from his armpits to his thighs (17). He is shortly thereafter sedated and carried as a prisoner to the capital city, where he is padlocked to the temple. Other instances of such misplaced pride are Gulliver’s description of the huge engine necessary to convey his body to court and the pains taken to lift him onto the carriage. He appears impressed that, if the Lilliputians were to ‘dispatch’ him, the stench of his carcass could ‘produce a Plague in the Metropolis, and probably spread through the whole Kingdom’ (27). Note also his tendency (seen throughout) to cast himself as spectacle (‘prodigious Numbers of … People [come] to see [him]’ [27]), a trope that is resumed more overtly in Part Two. The mock-epic comparison of the chairmen and beau to the Trojans bearing Greeks, which first appears to assert the debasement of the modern, then nastily equates modern and ancient, in ‘A Description of a City Shower,’ and the likening

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of the chamber pot to Pandora’s box (but not the feces to hope) in ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ pivot on a similar backspin. See also Said, who speaks of the structure of the Travels as a series of beginnings, ‘experiments in changing directions’ (30). The ‘decentralized’ nature of the narrative also contributes to such feelings of dizziness. The vertiginous effect of the Travels is compounded aurally through a confusing modulation and shifting of voices. See F.N. Smith. D. Donoghue argues that these ‘speed-shifts’ betray Swift’s indebtedness to the metaphysical poets (63). See Taylor on the importance of curiosities and public spectacles to Swift’s work. See also D. Todd’s discussion of monsters and identity in Gulliver’s Travels (163–9). Follows an accounting of Gulliver’s mishaps in Brobdingnag: (1) dropped into a bowl of cream by the Queen’s dwarf; his suit of clothes ‘utterly spoiled’; (2) wedged into a marrow-bone by same; (3) stung by flies; (4) terrified by wasps that fly into his house and carry off his sweet-cake; (5) pummelled by apples, by which he is knocked flat on his face; (6) struck to the ground by hail, after which he is confined ten days by bruises; (7) picked up by a spaniel; (8) tripped by a snail shell; (9) nearly taken up by a kite; (10) falls into a molehill; (11) his cake is stolen by thrushes; (12) thrashed by a linnet; its neck is wrung and Gulliver eats him; (13) nearly falls to the floor but is stopped by the governess’s corking-pin; (14) kidnapped by a monkey and fed like a baby, after which episode he keeps his bed a fortnight; (15) falls into cow dung; (16) fears being trod to death ‘like a Frog or young Puppy’; (17) fears being dashed onto a rock and eaten by an eagle; (18) finally, snatched up by an eagle and dropped into the sea. The ‘errors’ that Gulliver makes upon ‘reentry’ – mistaking his rescuers for ‘Pigmies’ (132) and stooping as he enters his house and receives his wife’s embrace (137) – suggest, as in Lilliput, both his receptiveness to the values of others and his tendency to exempt himself from the dominant criteria of the culture in which he finds himself (‘I winked at my own Littleness’ [136]). Such confusion suggests the extreme malleability of Swift’s persona, and will culminate in the hysteria of the fourth voyage and its aftermath. Other examples are Gulliver’s nautical feats in the trough (109), the chair of hair (114), and his performance at the spinet (115). In such instances Gulliver resumes his earlier incarnation as spectacle. Gulliver’s eager subservience to the King and Queen (‘I was my Master’s Slave’ [91]; ‘I was now her Majesty’s most humble Creature and Vassal’ [92]) shows how deeply he internalizes (as in Lilliput) his passivity. On the long-standing association of the body physical and the body politic, see, among others, Porter, Bodies Politic 229–49; Barkan 61–115; Kantorowicz; Hale. Note the Houyhnhnms’ curious exemption from bodily functions, and Swift’s

Notes to pages 51–6

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celebration of ‘decency’ and civility in the scatological poems. Tallman calls the Houyhnhnms ‘the apostles of anti-body’ (476), ‘purely dissociated’ (476). See L. Brown; Carnochan 10–12, 162–4; and, more recently, Franklin; A.C. Kelly. As Thomas Sheridan remarked of the motivation behind the creation of the Yahoos, it was ‘to place before the eyes of man a picture of the two different parts of his frame, detached from each other, in order that he may the better estimate the true value of each, and see the necessity there is that the one should have an absolute command over the other’ (1: 83–4). Cf. Defoe on the proper hierarchy of soul and body (see p. 25 above). Later Gulliver is said ‘exactly [to resemble the Yahoos] in my Head, Hands and Face’ (219). ‘It was plain,’ he sadly reports his Master as saying after the discovery of his clothes, ‘I must be a perfect Yahoo’ (221); ‘I owned my Resemblance,’ he concedes, ‘in every Part [to a Yahoo]’ (222). Later still, he remarks on ‘that entire Congruity betwixt me and their Yahoos’ (240), one that Gulliver (inexplicably) encourages by stripping up his sleeves and showing his ‘naked Arms and Breast in their Sight’ (247). The incident with the young female Yahoo puts the amorous seal on his ‘kind’: ‘now I could no longer deny, that I was a real Yahoo, in every Limb and Feature, since the Females had a natural Propensity to me as one of their own Species’ (249). This absorption of the vocabulary of racial difference marks not only Gulliver’s acceptance of the Houyhnhnms’ bipolar view of the world but also the alignment of his own race with the Yahooish qualities of sordidness, unteachableness, and savagery. Swift’s poetic impulses, according to Denis Donoghue, are often eerily akin to those of the Houyhnhnms: ‘his characteristic gestures [are] the imagery of veto, voiding, riddance, cleansing, deletion’ (30). If this urge for simplification or purification also lies behind ‘A Description of a City Shower’ or ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room,’ it does not suggest an easy way out, or perhaps any way out at all. Rodino’s formula: ‘impossible … choices among fraudulent alternatives’ (‘Notes’ 96–7). Kathleen M. Williams notes the ‘negative quality … of Swift’s satire … his inability, or his refusal, to present [the reader] straightforwardly with a positive to aim at’ (‘Gulliver’s Voyage’ 277). Effacement of self (as in Gulliver’s rapt silence during the Houyhnhnms’ conversations [259]) is preferable to this horrific reflection of one’s own bestiality. The ‘Master Bates’ issue, oddly, contributes to this sense of unhealthy self-absorption. See Greenacre 98–100; Fox; and, more largely, Ormsby-Lennon. Rodino argues that Gulliver’s position is worse than static; it is inextricably involved and involuted, the impenetrability of the Houyhnhnmian utopia resulting in the textual ‘mirroring and looping’ (‘“Splendide Mendax”’ 1057) that suggest, perhaps, the ineffectual forays into its core. Gulliver may cling to his trot and whinny precisely

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Notes to pages 57–62 because the textual manifestations of his experience have ranged wildly out of his control. (See Rodino, ‘“Splendide Mendax”’; Castle, ‘Why the Houyhnhnms Don’t Write.’) This anxiety may have reached an early culmination in the language machine of Part Three. Ong argues that Swift tends to render psychological elements spatially: ‘Swift likes to reduce psychological operations and situations immediately into spatial or local-motion components. Position is often made to play a decisive role’ (214); ‘in his concern with psychological operations, Swift tends frequently to conceive of them in a mechanistic or geometrical fashion – a fashion at once gross and vigorous. He favours immediate reduction of complex issues in terms of position or local motion’ (216). Fussell speaks similarly of the ‘characteristically Swiftian employment of particularized physical emblems and correlatives’ (115). The hack narrator of The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit is bent on proving the futility of ‘lifting up … the Soul … above Matter’ (174). Swift, in Herbert Davis’s estimation, is ‘the most extreme example that we have ever had in England of reaction against the heroic or romantic view of the poet’s function and art’ (163). D. Donoghue notes that Swift is ‘not deeply committed to literature, except as a form of politics’ (21). Taine called him an ‘artisan,’ not a poet (3: 233). ‘Scarcely one metaphor,’ writes Charles Henry Wilson, ‘is to be found in his works’ (1: lxxxvi). The pronouncement is extreme, but the rationale behind it is in keeping with Swift’s insistence on ‘keeping matters put.’ See Bullitt’s discussion of Swift’s project of satirically reducing by objectifying, of ‘[fleshing] abstract ideas or emotional reactions … with concrete imagery’ (183): ‘Swift’s … talent for ridiculing persons and ideas by a grave and scientific depiction of their physical and mechanical operation was not an artificial technique imposed ab extra upon his satiric objects. Instead, it seems evident that it was as natural as indignation for Swift to conceive ideas in a spatial and visual sense’ (181). See also Quinlan on Swift’s penchant towards literalizing. In ‘strip[ping such] disputes of any context,’ Swift ‘[reduces] them to what may be called their operational aspects’ (E. Zimmerman, Swift’s Narrative Satires 151). Such denuding of nuance, of cultural and interpretative context (E. Zimmerman 151) helps put things in perspective, but is a project hostile to thoughtful interpretation, a ‘cutting to the quick’ that shocks in its crudeness and simplicity.

3 Clarissa: Grace 1 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Ross. Subsequent references are to this – the first (1747–8) – edition by page. References to the third – AMS – edition of Clarissa are by volume and page.

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2 The phrase is taken from the subtitle of Warner’s controversial Reading Clarissa. 3 Having finished Volume IV and suspicious that such a resolution was not in the offing, Lady Bradshaigh wrote to Richardson entreating a ‘turn,’ and cursing him elaborately if he persisted in his scheme to ‘make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy.’ Richardson patiently rebutted the logic of such a request, and when ‘Belfour’ was finally prevailed upon to read the last volumes of his novel, she did so ‘in Agonies,’ shedding ‘verily … a Pint of Tears’ (Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson, 10 October 1748 and 6–11 January 1749, quoted in Eaves and Kimpel 221, 224). Richardson reports this dilemma and (to his satisfaction) resolves it in his Postscript (1495–99), much expanded in the third edition (VIII, 277–99). (Lady Bradshaigh, in her annotations to Volume V of Clarissa, would later refer to her wish as ‘childish’ [Barchas 103].) For illuminating commentary on the debates over Clarissa’s ending, see Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa 199–244. Lady Elizabeth Echlin’s saccharine coda (in which the rape does not occur and Lovelace dies a penitent) has been reprinted as An Alternative Ending to Richardson’s Clarissa. 4 Clarissa, in this sense, has not, as Julie Park has recently argued, become incorporeal (54), but solely, even tauntingly, corporeal, though, once spirit and body are severed, the location of the self (as Clarissa’s serene smile, the power of her corpse, and Lovelace’s frantic demands for her heart demonstrate) is a fraught question. 5 Flynn summarizes the feats to which Lovelace’s megalomaniacal imagination gives rise (Samuel Richardson 219–28). See also Kinkead-Weekes on Lovelace (Samuel Richardson 142–276). 6 See also Jocelyn Harris, who describes Lovelace’s restlessness and self-interest as manifestations of a Hobbesian point of view. ‘[Lovelace’s] liberty,’ Harris maintains, ‘is actually license,’ a wilful violation of social and moral codes (332). 7 Indeed, the culminating event of Clarissa’s violation is announced in terms that conflate self-congratulation and defeat: ‘And now, Belford, I can go no farther’ (883). On the consignment of true power in the novel from Lovelace to Clarissa, see my ‘“Tremble and Reform.” On references to Lovelace’s impotence, which at least one critic has taken quite literally, see Wilt. 8 Such states of self-indulgence and disempoweredness are characteristic of schizophrenics. See Laing 90–6, and the fruitful applications of Laing’s ideas to Lovelace by, among others, Beer and Preston (83–5). On Lovelace’s entrapment in the creed of libertinism, see further Turner. 9 Richardson records the errors of parental management that have led to this state of affairs: Lovelace, an only child, was pampered by his mother, subject to no check or control (46, 74, 1031, 1431). Eagleton contends, after Otto Rank on Don Juan, that Lovelace’s rapacious desire for Clarissa is in effect his search for the unattainable (because desireless) mother (58), a forecast of Victor Frankenstein’s dilemma deepened by this loveless son’s peculiar susceptibility to the horrible widow

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Notes to pages 69–70

Sinclair (‘our mother’ [522]). Frega argues that oppressive parental preoccupation gives rise to the deep concerns about autonomy shared by Lovelace and Clarissa (30–4, 47–8). See J. Stevenson (‘“Alien Spirits”’) and Ellmann 78–9, 103, on Lovelace’s distaste for the sexual act. Lovelace’s rakish fantasy of paternity, bastard twin Lovelaces, ‘eager hunter[s]’ at the (anxious) maternal breast, exemplifies this Satanic urge for expansion rather than contraction, for expenditure rather than rest (and for tyranny rather than love) (706). Such a world view is explicitly juxtaposed to Clarissa’s irrelative one, in which, as she argues to Lovelace, ‘There is a right and a wrong in everything, let people put what glosses they please upon their actions. To condemn a deviation, and to follow it by as great a one, what is this doing but propagating a general corruption? A stand must be made by somebody, turn round the evil as many as may, or virtue will be lost: and shall it not be I, a worthy mind will say, that shall make this stand?’ (290). That society cannot accept (or act upon) such a view is demonstrated by Colonel Morden’s decision to ignore Clarissa’s injunctions to leave Lovelace to his fate. ‘No good man but must be concluded by [her arguments],’ Morden writes to Belford, hinting at his inclination to override Clarissa’s wishes, ‘– But, alas! sir, who is good?’ (1446). ‘Why will she break from me, when good resolutions are taking place?’ Lovelace complains to Belford. ‘– The red-hot iron she refuses to strike – Oh why will she suffer the yielding wax to harden?’ (853). The desire here seems to be for a violent overthrow akin to that Donne desires of his God. This is Doody’s and (in part) Winner’s view. See Doody, A Natural Passion 124, and Winner 57–9. As Lovelace complains insultingly to Belford after the rape, ‘I am confoundedly out of conceit with myself. If I give up my contrivances, my joy in stratagem, and plot, and invention, I shall be but a common man: such another dull heavy creature as thyself. Yet what does even my success in my machinations bring me, but disgrace, repentance, regret?’ (907). Lovelace’s search for novelty is a transgressive desire to overleap the bounds of the true and the good, as his early self-made images of giganticism suggest: ‘How it swells my pride to have been able to outwit such a vigilant charmer!’ he boasts to Belford after the abduction. ‘– I am taller by half a yard, in my imagination, than I was! … – Last night … I took off my hat, as I walked, to see if the lace were not scorched, supposing it had brushed down a star; and, before I put it on again … I was for buffeting the moon’ (402); ‘Stand by, and let me swell!’ he trumpets in a later passage. ‘– I am already as big as an elephant; and ten times wiser! mightier too by far! Have I not reason to snuff the moon with my proboscis?’ (473).

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16 He is confident that a storm (found, or if not found, made) will assist his designs against Anna Howe and her mother in the infamous Isle of Wight scheme (IV, 254, removed from the first edition). 17 Treatments of the law in Clarissa (in its bearing on Clarissa’s inheritance as well as on her abduction and rape) suggest the complexity of the system that fails to come to Clarissa’s defence. See, among others, Schwarz, ‘Eighteenth-Century Abduction Law’ and ‘Family Dynamics’; Swan, ‘Clarissa Harlowe’ and ‘Raped by the System’; Macpherson 59–97; Zomchick, Family and the Law 58–104. 18 As Clarissa notes parenthetically (that is, as if a truism) to Anna Howe, ‘Who loves not power?’ (78). 19 Eagleton’s reference here is to Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’ 88–9. 20 Braudy reads this disposition as a defensive posture of the self, a guard against the tyrannical incursions of others (199). 21 Contrast Lovelace, who adopts more the Peter Elbow method: ‘Aw-w-w-w-haugh – Pox of this yawning! Is not thy uncle dead yet?’ (691). What is astonishing about Clarissa’s letters is that, as Eagleton has observed, she ‘speaks as she writes, as admirably undishevelled in oral style as she is in her script. It is not … that her writing reflects her experience but that her experience is, as it were, already “written”’ (51). It may be romantic error automatically to regard such propriety as either a capitulation to the power structure or as repression. For a different view, see Eagleton 50–1. 22 The letter-snatching scene, 572–3, is a brilliant demonstration of this metonymic principle, as are Lovelace’s repeated word plays on the paraphernalia of the letter industry (‘seals,’ ‘plications,’ ‘wafers’). 23 Eagleton maintains that the ‘absolute standards’ of truth, justice, and the self with which Clarissa is concerned are in fact inaccessible, ‘indissociable from the shifting power strategies in which they are embedded’ (79). ‘Truth’ in an absolute sense is thus not only irrecoverable but, because patriarchy controls the criteria for truth, also valueless, in that it cannot function on behalf of its adherents. This, Eagleton argues, is the most important and disturbing political insight of Richardson’s novel. That Clarissa strives to recover such truth despite such an awareness is a measure of her grandeur and her tragedy. See Warner’s darker reading of Clarissa’s constructed ‘self,’ 17–27. 24 Wolff discusses Clarissa’s self-scrutiny in the context of the Puritan tradition of self-examination (18–19, 127–41). 25 ‘Clarissa,’ writes Dussinger, ‘fails utterly to move from childhood dependence on the family to … adult independence in society… [Her wish is] to recapture the lost happiness of prenatal being’ (Discourse 125–6). Ferguson argues that Clarissa after the rape ‘declines’ to a state of mental and ‘medical’ infancy (a state of legal nonconsent) and thereby escapes Lovelace’s tyrannical design to implicate her in

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Notes to pages 73–5 this step into the world of experience (106–7). Van Ghent also comments on Clarissa’s sexual immaturity, calling Richardson’s novel ‘a paean to death’ (63). Such a nomination may be true, but for reasons more far-reaching than those Van Ghent discusses. On Clarissa’s (orthodox) desire for celibacy and denial of the flesh, see Wendt, ‘Clarissa’s Coffin.’ Another view of Clarissa’s ‘childishness’ (the infantilization to which her family subjects her) is discussed by Suarez. Lasch’s notion of nostalgia as a representation of an incontiguous past suggests just such a dislocation (82–3). Lovelace, interestingly, suffers from an opposite (or, perhaps, from Lasch’s point of view, a related) affliction: a refusal to remember (Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson 409). Lovelace compels her to pass as, among others, his runaway sister and his wife. He gloats when she opens a letter superscribed to ‘Mrs Lovelace.’ This is, of course, a process that has begun well before the abduction, at Harlowe Place, where the Harlowes attempt to foist upon Clarissa a role of duty that she already embodies in a far more profound way than they can grasp. Castle maintains that Anna Howe, in her teasing remarks on Clarissa’s inclination towards Lovelace, engages in the same kind of tyrannical exegesis (Clarissa’s Ciphers 76–80). See Castle’s remarks on Clarissa as a victim of interruption and interpretation, Clarissa’s Ciphers 57–80. See Wolff, 162, who describes this transformation in spiritual terms, as a sanctification, a shift from sinner to saint. See also Flynn, Samuel Richardson 257. See Copeland 51–2. As Clarissa realizes that the only reparation to her tragedy can come from a truthful recitation of her history (see her letter to Dr Lewen, 1252–5), the issue of audience becomes an increasing and complicated preoccupation. J. Stevenson, ‘Courtship’ 758. Whether the Harlowes’ motivations in marrying their daughter off to the odious Solmes are financial or, as Stevenson contends, emotional, the end result is the same: an abrogation of Clarissa’s will. ‘One of the principal views of the publication,’ Richardson maintains in the Preface to Clarissa, is ‘to caution parents against the undue exertion of their natural authority over their children in the great article of marriage’ (36). See Tanner on variations on the concept of will in Clarissa, 100–12. See Clarissa’s repeated embarrassment at her mother’s submission of her will to that of her husband. Eagleton argues bleakly that the doctrine of affective love, rather than enfranchising women from a purely ‘market’ view of marriage, increased men’s hold on women through a kind of ‘emotional blackmail’ (16). Despite Richardson’s public assertions about the possibilities of happiness in marriage, a pervasive pattern of images connects the wedded state and war in Clarissa. The Vicar-General’s seal dangling from the marriage license gives Lovelace the occasion for cynical iconographic analysis: ‘two crossed swords; to show that

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marriage is a state of offence as well as defence: three lions; to denote that those who enter into the state ought to have a triple proportion of courage. And … three crooked horns, smartly top-knotted with ribands; which being the ladies’ wear seem to indicate that they may very probably adorn, as well as bestow, the bull’s feather … the devil take them for their hieroglyphics!’ (871–2). The only characters in the novel who demonstrate an alternative view are Mrs Norton (whose worthy husband is dead) and Clarissa (who, to her cost, clings to an ideal of married love that appears to have no basis in the real world). The altar and the halter, to adapt a later figure of Lovelace, are effectively identical (1050). Anna appears to read Clarissa (in her final scene) as a victim of the ‘sex war’: ‘Oh sir!’ she cries to Colonel Morden at Clarissa’s coffin. ‘– see you not here! – see you not here – the glory of her sex? – thus by the most villainous of yours – thus – laid low!’ (1402). This is, of course, only one of the many diverse readings superimposed upon the now ‘illegible’ Clarissa. (See Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers 136–47.) See J. Stevenson on Lovelace’s cerebral emphasis, ‘“Alien Spirits”’ 86–8. For Lovelace in the scene of the rape, as Stevenson argues, ‘his flesh remains purely an instrument of his consciousness’ (88). I adopt Fried’s useful distinction here. Lovelace’s dramatic skill and his connection with things dramatic have been exhaustively discussed. See, among others, Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson 153–7, 251–2, 274–5; Palmer; Doody, A Natural Passion 107–27, and ‘Disguise and Personality’; Richetti, ‘Lovelace Goes Shopping at Smith’s.’ See Laing on the schizoid’s fear of engulfment: ‘A firm sense of one’s own autonomous identity is required in order that one may be related as one human being to another. Otherwise, any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity’ (45–6). Lovelace’s penchant for turbulent self-display rules out any form of communitas. He wreaks havoc at Lord M’s, causing his cousins, aunts, and uncle to inhabit separate parts of the house, and he is shadowed by a servant whose broken mouth is a constant reminder of his master’s violence. The egoistic and supercilious disregard for others extends even to Belford, whom he insults repeatedly and whom on at least one occasion he threatens to pulverize mercilessly (1069). Indeed, as Richetti notes, Belford as correspondent is ‘little more than an excuse for Lovelace’s self-dramatization’ (‘Richardson’s Dramatic Art’ 297). See also Lovelace’s frantic behaviour at Mrs Smith’s and Richetti’s brilliant analysis of this scene (‘Lovelace Goes Shopping at Smith’s’). Castle investigates this issue as a discursive one, lamenting Clarissa’s eventual loss of voice in the novel (Clarissa’s Ciphers 136–7). Kramnick points out that Clarissa’s definition of agency has, in fact, little to do with acting (194–230). That such a state is not unequivocally disempowering proves the complexity of this paradox.

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Notes to pages 82–4

41 That self must be asserted because of the breakdown of authority without. See Stuber on this deadlock. 42 Castle discusses this powerlessness as a consequence of Clarissa’s almost wilful exegetic naïveté (92–107). 43 See Goldberg (97–8) on this paradox, and on Clarissa’s at once incredulous and anxious disclaimer at the porch of the church, ‘Action! … I have committed no bad action!’ (1051). Under the terms of this definition, the body, it seems, is destined only to betray the soul. 44 The Harlowes’ garden, in the conservative, ‘stiff’, Dutch style, borders a haunted coppice, in which a man was found hanging some twenty years prior to the commencement of Clarissa’s history. 45 Richardson’s concern with freedom and autonomy links Clarissa to Milton’s epic in a fundamental way. See, among others, Beer; Noble; Yoder. 46 Richetti comments interestingly on one reason this moment is so irresistible to Clarissa: ‘In this scene, Lovelace tricks her into entering a world of action and movement where precisely those dramatic simplifications that she has been avoiding appear with a force that she cannot resist. Instead of thinking, she imagines and visualizes in an instant what she has been refining and sifting at great length’ (‘Richardson’s Dramatic Art’ 299). 47 See Doody on the shocking manner in which legal definitions of guilt and innocence compromise Clarissa and mitigate Lovelace’s crime (‘Disguise and Personality’ 29–37). The recent work of Macpherson and Kramnick raise provocative questions about agency and responsibility in Clarissa (Macpherson 59–97; Kramnick 194–230). 48 Janet Butler disagrees, arguing that the garden operates symbolically in this section of the novel to suggest Clarissa’s wilful disobedience, effectively overshadowing Richardson’s quibbles about her volition. Richardson was deeply concerned at having this moment of Clarissa’s drama ‘read’ correctly. In a letter to Aaron Hill, he called Clarissa’s innocence as to a voluntary commission of a fault at the garden gate ‘the most material Point of all, respecting my Heroine’s Character,’ insisting that he designed in her ‘no Voluntary Fault, but that of meeting him’ (Samuel Richardson to Aaron Hill, 26 January 1746/7, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson 82–3). Butler calls such delineation ‘hair-splitting’: ‘This letter [to Hill] contains the seeds of Richardson’s philosophical trouble,’ she asserts: ‘she was to be “faultless,” yet the deed was to be “inexcusable”; the doer morally chaste, only the deed itself wrong’ (542). In a universe in which action is charged with such difficulty and onus, and the body so often passive (Clarissa 303) or ‘in confederacy against [the mind]’ (475), this distinction is, as it is in current law, by no means sophistic. Clarissa echoes to Anna Howe the lines from Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus, ‘My FEET are guilty; but my HEART is free’ (568), and insists to the end of her life on the inculpability of her will (1372, 1375).

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49 As Damrosch argues, after Lucien Goldmann, the self now, tragically and painfully, must ‘work out its destiny within the world that it rejects’ (257). Such an enterprise is by definition doomed to failure because, as Wehrs remarks, Clarissa can approach moral independence in this world only through exercising a selfinterest that would subvert the idealism to which she is pledged (769–70). 50 In Weinstein’s words, ‘The closed coffin and the letters are resonant figures of the self’s privacy and inner kingdom; they are also forbidding images of closure, and the riches they convey can be negotiated only through absence and death’ (180). See also Ellmann 81–3. 51 See Keymer, ‘Richardson’s Meditations,’ and Richardson’s Clarissa 218–44; Erickson 217–28; Spacks, ‘Female Orders’ 162. 4 Tom Jones: Cohesion 1 Mme de Staël, who viewed love as the chief subject of the novel form, discusses its centrality to Tom Jones (45–6). Boucé notes the ‘truly astonishing range of Fielding’s variations on the themes of sex, amours and love in Tom Jones’ (‘Sex’ 26), and Kinkead-Weekes (‘Out of the Thicket’) has contended that Fielding’s concerns about love eclipse his lessons about prudence in the novel. 2 Such similes are a hallmark of Partridge’s exegeses on love, as he repeatedly attempts to turn Tom’s attention back to the body (as opposed to the heart). They recur in the discussion of Mrs Waters’s ‘Operations’ against Tom at Upton (510–11), establishing her interest in Tom as chiefly carnal. 3 See Kinkead-Weekes, who argues that Tom Jones is about ‘the need to acquire wisdom through loving more and better’ (‘Out of the Thicket’ 148). 4 Harriet Fitzpatrick (in the battle for Mr Fitzpatrick at Bath), Nightingale (in his careless toying with Nancy), and Lady Bellaston (in her systematic seduction of younger men) display how not to love, according to Fielding, as do Captain Blifil in his eager suit for Allworthy’s ‘House and Gardens, and … his Lands, Tenements and Hereditaments’ (67), and the tyrant-fathers (Western, the uncles Nightingale, the Quaker) as they assiduously arrange marriages of financial convenience for their offspring. 5 Joseph has obviously hearkened to Mrs Adams, who roundly contradicts her husband’s cautions about giving ‘too much way to [the] Passions’ (310): ‘Be as good a Husband as you are able, and love your Wife with all your Body and Soul too’ (311). 6 Many contemporary readers of Tom Jones misunderstood Fielding’s emphasis in Tom Jones, decrying the novel on account of its lowness. ‘Aretine,’ in a famous attack on Fielding in Old England, called the novel a ‘motely History of Bastardism, Fornication and Adultery … truly profligate, of …. evil Tendency, and offensive to every chaste Reader.’ ‘Orbilius’ devoted 119 pages to a defamation of

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Fielding on account of the ‘bad Morals’ (118) of Tom Jones. Samuel Richardson remarked also, famously and repeatedly, on the novel’s ‘bad Tendency’ (letter to Astraea and Minerva Hill, 4 August 1749; Selected Letters 127). ‘Tom Jones,’ he wrote to J. B. de Freval (21 January 1751), ‘is a dissolute book’ (Selected Letters 175). Comments on the ‘looseness’ of the novel’s (and Fielding’s) morality continued into the nineteenth century. Rawson summarizes the counter-argument to this view: ‘the whole moral atmosphere of Tom Jones [is] its feeling that sexual love, even in the case of some passing and occasionally some really disreputable amours, is to be valued to the extent that it carries warmth and mutuality of feeling’ (Henry Fielding 15). Sir Walter Scott had argued the same case in 1821, asserting that Tom’s ‘fine [qualities] of frankness and generosity’ far outweighed his bad ones, and wagering that no libertines had been created by Fielding’s novel (‘Henry Fielding’ 55). Lawrence feebly applauded Fielding’s attempt ‘to defend the Old Adam’ in an age that, in his view, was ‘recoiling in violence away from the physical’ (‘Introduction to these Paintings’ 552). See, more fruitfully, Murry on the ‘positive moral conviction’ of Fielding’s ‘ethics of the sexual relation’ in Tom Jones (Unprofessional Essays 33). Peter Carlton argues that Tom’s sexual misdeeds are repeatedly mitigated by the more onerous crimes of other characters (such as Bridget and Captain Blifil) and that Fielding palliates the conduct of his charismatic hero by, for example, distracting the reader from the fact that Tom is in bed with Mrs Waters by Fitzpatrick’s ‘uproarious entrance’ (399). Koppel feels that such moments reveal Fielding’s confusion about sexual ethics. Ian Watt argues, more sensibly, that Fielding, insofar as he treats matters of sexuality, ‘attempts to broaden our moral sense rather than to intensify its punitive operations against licentiousness’ (Rise of the Novel 283). On physiognomy in Tom Jones, see Tytler, as well as Miller’s comments on ‘An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,’ Essays 192–5. The reader is repeatedly pressed into service in this regard. On the importance of judging character aright in Fielding, see, among others, Wilner; Preston 114–32; Reilly. J. Stevenson discusses the pervasiveness of the legal paradigm (which emphasizes the primacy of judgment) in Tom Jones (Real History 77–101). See also Welsh on trials and evidence in Tom Jones (48–76). The chorus of objection has been strong since Johnson’s famous comparisons of Fielding and Richardson. ‘Richardson,’ Johnson is said to have pronounced, ‘had picked the kernel of life … while Fielding was contented with the husk’ (Piozzi 127). Boswell recorded a similar comparison: ‘there was as great a difference between [Richardson and Fielding, Johnson said,] as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dialplate’ (2: 49). See also Leavis, Great Tradition 4; Hunter, Occasional Form 162–3;

Notes to pages 101–8

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and Watt, Rise of the Novel, who argues that Fielding’s ‘external’ approach to his characters is ‘a necessary condition of the success of his main comic purpose’ (265). Clarissa’s tragic apotheosis (her displacement from a quotidian world that recognizes, perfunctorily, her moral and physical beauty to a world of absolutes that guards her from those who fail deeply to value those qualities) marks Richardson’s view of the body as, finally, divergent from Fielding’s, not in the sense that spiritual beauty cannot be incarnated in ‘real’ men and women but that no character’s action (no action of plot) will ratify such a fact. On the incompatibility of Fielding’s and Richardson’s moral and worldly visions, see Poovey, ‘Journeys.’ Andrew Wright argues, in the context of a discussion of Allworthy, for the intimate connection between ‘physical stamina’ and ‘moral health’ (161). In Fielding’s view, the more ‘vital’ the character, the more likely it is that he or she will engage in meaningful moral action. The physical, in this regard, does not present as much a psychological dilemma as a moral or social one. Coleridge, indeed, repeatedly associated Fielding’s work with the healthfulness and stimulation of fresh air in motion: ‘How charming, how wholesome Fielding always is!’ he is said to have exclaimed in 1834. ‘To take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy day in May’ (Table Talk 1: 496; cf. 2: 295). This impression of disengagement is artfully conveyed by Fielding in his tendency to relegate Blifil offstage, where most of his destructive engineering occurs. The contrast with Richardson’s Clarissa, who requires such estrangement from the world, is striking testimony to Fielding’s and Richardson’s radically different attitudes towards energy and restraint. See Battestin (Moral Basis 66–72, 78–81, 94–104) on the importance of active benevolence or charity in Fielding. In A.N. Kaul’s words, ‘Philosophical doctrines meant little [to Fielding] except as active principles of conduct’ (153). Some of this job is performed metonymically through the adventures of Sophy’s muff (see Maurice Johnson 129–37). ‘Orbilius’ found such passages indelicate (46). See Rawson (Henry Fielding 15–16) and, on the problems of the ‘enclosed self’ and Fielding’s endorsement of love and charity, Golden 1–75. ‘If Tom’s vigorous appetites too easily master him,’ Henry Knight Miller sagely remarks, ‘(and judgment will be passed on this), those very appetites are nevertheless testimony to the potentia, “the good soil,” that will issue in an essential maturity of health, normality, and high capacity for love’ (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 80). (‘Silenus and Priapus,’ as Miller also reminds us, ‘hover about the comic scene … classic comedy … is in its essence a phallic song, a celebration of fertility and life’ [Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 80–1].)

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Notes to pages 108–17

19 In tracing the course of their relationship, Fielding characterizes Molly as designing, ‘bold and forward,’ and Tom as ‘[backward]’ (175), and remarks that Tom would have had too much or too little ‘of the Heroe’ had he not responded to her overtures (175). Later in the novel, Mrs Miller depicts Tom as a victim preyed upon by urban love-sophisticates: ‘I beg you not to converse with these wicked Women,’ she implores her lodger. ‘You are a young Gentleman, and do not know half their artful Wiles’ (759). 20 On the influence upon Fielding of Shaftesbury and of the Latitudinarians, see, among others, Battestin, Moral Basis 12–13, 62–3, and L. Butler. 21 Alter sees Tom’s morality as ‘natural’ in the tradition of the picaroon. ‘The virtues of the picaresque hero,’ he writes, ‘… are principally the virtues of the heart. One of the reasons why he never even puts up a pretense of moral punctiliousness is that he is not concerned in the least with theories of morals. His own ethical behaviour – for better or for worse – is the result of natural instinct’ (Rogue’s Progress 95). See also Zomchick, who argues that Tom has an ‘innate moral nature’ (‘“Penetration”’ 536). Miller discusses the tension between ‘claims of Liberty’ (flesh, fertility) and ‘[those] of Law,’ claims that are reconciled by the novel’s end (he maintains) in the marriage bed (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 81). 22 Miller discusses Fielding’s reflections on man’s contradictory nature in Essays 113–18. 23 Contemporary critics of Tom Jones exhibited considerable objections to this philosophy. ‘That so great a Voluptuary as Mr. Jones,’ wrote ‘Orbilius,’ ‘should be alternately committing Acts of Debauchery, and tasting, by conferring, the Pleasures of Beneficence (which he does in this Chapter by leaving his Beneficiary, to attend the Call of the infamous Lady Bellaston), is an Inconsistency in Character never before heard of’ (90). Johnson inveighed solemnly against the moral problems posed by ‘mixed’ characters: ‘Many writers, for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages, that they are both equally conspicuous; and as we accompany them through their adventures with delight, and are led by degrees to interest ourselves in their favour, we lose the abhorrence of their faults, because they do not hinder our pleasure, or, perhaps, regard them with some kindness for being united with so much merit … It is of the utmost importance to mankind, that positions of this tendency should be laid open and confuted’ (The Rambler 23–4). Mme du Deffand found Tom’s mixture of traits attractive (letter to Walpole, 8 August 1773) (Walpole, Correspondence 390–1). 24 ‘From the former of these [Nature], he derived an agreeable Person, a sound Constitution, a solid Understanding, and a benevolent Heart; by the latter [Fortune], he was decreed to the Inheritance of one of the largest Estates in the County’ (34). The description of Allworthy is set into deliberate juxtaposition with that of Bridg-

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et, whose more tormented and secretive ‘inner’ life is reflected in the proliferation of conditional clauses that force the reader to entertain (at least in theory) multiple points of view on a character that will (literally) generate and complicate the story that Fielding is about to tell. Thus, the narrator, presenting Tom and Blifil in the narrative for the first time, reinforces the primacy of action over discursive explanation: ‘An Incident which happened about this Time, will set the Characters of these two Lads, more fairly before the discerning Reader, than is in the Power of the longest Dissertation’ (119). A recurring comic effect in Tom Jones is the explosion of a high-toned moral harangue by a dramatic event that completely overturns it. The incident of Square in Molly’s bedroom and the episode of the puppet-show are two cases in point. See Damrosch on the Puritan elements of the Man of the Hill’s long-winded account, which proves (in his words) ‘no match for Fielding’s medley of literary devices in presenting an image of truth’ (276). Indeed, the Man not only is radically simplistic in his views of human nature, but also lacks insight about himself. ‘Imprisoned within a dreadful privacy,’ writes Damrosch, ‘the old man badly needs a comic narrator to tell his story for him and to liberate him into the complexities of social existence’ (276). See also Jerome Mandel on the bad monologics of the Man of the Hill (37–8). For Fielding, the important virtues, such as charity and love, are always enacted, not simply vocalized. See Hatfield 173–8. The same tone of mock chagrin accompanies the revelation of the philosopher Square in Molly’s closet. This concept is Robert Alter’s (Fielding 36–7, 41). Dorothy Van Ghent, relatedly, argues that Fielding’s sentences are ‘complex “plots” in themselves’ and hence repeat the dramatic emphasis in Fielding’s novel on the most basic level (80). (Cf. Miller, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 99.) See also Arthur Sherbo’s discussion of the embeddedness, elaborations, and volte-faces that are aspects of Fielding’s distinctive novelistic style (58–84). The Man of the Hill is a notable example of a narrator who rarely engages the remarks of his audience. He responds not at all, for example, to Tom’s dramatic ‘Turns about the Room’ at the mention of love (456–7). The Man also exhibits an inability to gauge the temperament of his listeners, as is exhibited in Mr Watson’s inclination to sleep during his discourse on reform (475). (Partridge, too, impatiently interrupts [457] and finally dozes off during his tale [486].) Taine comments on Fielding’s expansiveness (3: 289–90, 292). Wells remarks on the ‘more spacious form of novel-writing,’ ‘the right to roam, of the earlier English novel,’ of which Fielding is a notable representative (137–8). See, among others, Lutwack on the ‘mixed’ prose style of Tom Jones, and Lockwood on the influence of the periodical essay on the narrative style of the novel. Henry Knight Miller, in ‘Some Functions of Rhetoric in Tom Jones,’ illuminates

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the richness of Fielding’s artistic strategies in Tom Jones. (See also Miller, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 85–101, and ‘The Voices of Henry Fielding.’) 31 See also the tribute to ‘Experience’ (as opposed to pedantry) that informs Fielding’s method and the invocation in Book XIII, chapter i (687), and Fielding’s repudiation of the supernatural in Book XVII, chapter i (875–6). Schmidgen’s discussion of the importance of embedded descriptions in Fielding (67–74) reiterates the central role of ‘context’ in both an aesthetic and a political sense in Fielding’s work. 32 The displacement of emphasis on ‘inner feelings’ to social context is exhibited most clearly in Allworthy’s ‘deathbed’ scene, where Fielding focuses not on the inner emotions of the principal player (Allworthy) but on the social context in which that act gathers meaning, the ‘complex “field” of interreactions, expectations, role-playing, and the like, that this central situation evokes’ (Miller, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 63). See p. 97 above. 5 A Simple Story: Dissipation 1 In Spacks’s words, ‘Miss Milner in her active energy has struggled with Dorriforth and his powerful restraint. The struggle is resolved not by the reconciliation of these two forms of personal force or by the triumph of one over the other, but by a resort to social assignment of power. After accepting the subordination of marriage, Lady Elmwood blazes into utter insubordination. Then, will-less, she must die. Her daughter knows better than to make any claim for herself. The female “freedom” Castle celebrates has found little scope’ (Desire and Truth 199). 2 Wollstonecraft, who was concerned primarily with Inchbald’s treatment of education in the novel, regarded the second half of the work as reparative in intent, with the home-schooled Lady Matilda serving as antidote to the frivolously raised Miss Milner (7: 369–70). Robert Palfrey Utter and Gwendolyn Bridges Needham (389) and Gary Kelly concur, arguing that in Part II of A Simple Story Inchbald aims to ‘[restore] the balance [of Part I]’ (G. Kelly 72). Most modern critics have held with Wollstonecraft in seeing the novel’s design as antithetical, but, unlike Wollstonecraft, locate the author’s deepest loyalties with Miss Milner, regarding the elevation of Matilda in the second section as a concession or an expiation for the excesses of the first two volumes. Thus, Katharine M. Rogers and Jane Spencer read (as does Spacks) the second half of the novel not as a repair but as a ‘failure of nerve’ (Rogers 71), an ‘atonement … for the boldness of the first’ (Spencer, Introd. xx; see also her The Rise of the Woman Novelist 160–1). Eleanor Ty (85–100) and Anna Lot (644) similarly note the dangerous power and attractiveness of Miss Milner. Castle, J. Todd, and Clemit, adopting yet another view, see in Matilda’s story not a reversion to the patriarchal order but a canny augmentation of

Notes to pages 126–8

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the political claims (to female liberty and self-expression) that Inchbald makes in the initial part of the tale (Castle 295; J. Todd 228; Clemit xxiii–iv). G.L. Strachey made a similar observation in his introduction to the 1908 edition of A Simple Story (iv). George Haggerty’s reading of A Simple Story (37–51) calls interesting attention to the Gothic elements of Inchbald’s tale, among them the attraction of the tyrannical father figure. See G. Kelly on Inchbald’s obvious attempts to parallel the two histories, 88–93. Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to Elizabeth Inchbald in 1810, epitomizes this view, speaking of Inchbald’s ‘force,’ and the ‘intensity’ of her expressive signs (Boaden 2: 153). See n. 18 below. See also [Rev. of A Simple Story] 437. Castle identifies a similar volte-face in the story’s conclusion, likening the effect of Inchbald’s ‘romance solution’ to the reversal of an electromagnetic field (Masquerade 324). Such breathless changes contribute to the novel’s distinctively volatile atmosphere. The adjective is Gonda’s, 187. ‘Why,’ Wollstonecraft asks, complaining of Inchbald’s portrayal of Matilda as weak and undignified, ‘do all female writers, even when they display their abilities, always give a sanction to the libertine reveries of men? Why do they poison the minds of their own sex, by strengthening a male prejudice that makes women systematically weak?’ (7: 370). Candace Ward treats the difficulty of redressing such imbalances in the age of sensibility. Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. Clemit 183. Subsequent references are to this edition by page. One example of such whitewashing occurs in the precis of Miss Milner’s character at the beginning of Volume III: ‘We left Lady Elmwood in the last volume at the summit of human happiness; a loving and beloved bride’ (184) – this pronouncement despite clear evidence of insurgency in Miss Milner’s objection to the date set for the Anglican celebration of her marriage and in the face of repeated references to haste, shock, shame, and other emotions and actions uncharacteristic of happy wedding scenes. The urge to summarize and be done occurs on another level in Lady Elmwood’s own brief account of her history in her posthumous letter to Lord Elmwood (198–9). Inchbald writes that Lord Elmwood conceals his illness from Lady Elmwood from ‘a too cautious fear of her uneasiness’ (185). In regarding his wife as unable to manage the emotional complexity of worry, Lord Elmwood treats her with condescension and unwittingly alienates her from him (Haggerty 44). The newspaper obituary suggests, however, an opposite view: Lord Elmwood erred not by overprotecting but by underprotecting his wife. The paper’s summary of their marital history notes that Lady Elmwood and Lord Elmwood (pointedly referred

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Notes to pages 129–31 to in his former incarnation as the lady’s ‘guardian’ [192]) ‘enjoyed an uncommon share of felicity, till his lordship going abroad, and remaining there some time, the consequences (to a most captivating young woman left without a protector) were such, as to cause a separation on his return’ (192). Here, in levying the finger of blame against Lord Elmwood, the culture makes an even more demeaning assumption about his lady: his failure to exercise his function as ‘protector’ and ‘guardian’ (synonyms for ‘husband’ in this instance) has resulted in what the newspaper regards as the inevitable fall: young women, by nature designed to ‘captivate’ (men), must be actively ‘constrained’ and ‘bound’ by the vows and ties of marriage lest they recklessly ensnare others. (Similar concepts and images of limitation echo throughout the betrothal scene.) Loosed from the constraining bonds (the guardianship) of the husband, the wife will fall, as if by a physical law, because her role – that is, the role promulgated by her culture and her upbringing – devolves solely upon the entrapment of the male. Firmer and more sensitive guardianship, as for Eve, might have contraverted Lady Elmwood’s fall. By either reading, she may be seen as suffering from lack of emotional stamina. On the impropriety of Miss Milner’s education, see Wollstonecraft 7: 370, and Utter and Needham 389. For helpful outlines of contemporary debates on women’s education, see Spencer, Introd. xii–xv, and G. Kelly 71–4. Lord Elmwood’s troubles with ‘underlings’ are perpetual. Voyaging to the West Indies to solve one problem of defection and encroachment, he unwittingly recreates the situation at home. This dilemma is part of a pattern of insubordination and collapse that distinguishes the novel throughout. Cf. Lovelace, whose histrionics conceal a profound lack of an authentic self. That the masquerade becomes the pivotal event in Miss Milner’s campaign for liberty significantly links license with loss (or concealment) of (true) self. The central paradox of the masquerade, of course, is that in ‘licensing’ transgression, in removing the boundaries between what is permitted and what is not, it cannot in and of itself define ‘risk.’ This may be why (pace Castle) Inchbald does not dramatize the event in her novel. An atmosphere of sobriety and propriety is a far better – and clearer – stage for a flirt or a rebel. This is also why Miss Milner does not really wish to be ‘free.’ This is a term that Sandford, Lord Elmwood, and the narrator use to describe Miss Milner, 16, 43, 179. ‘Submission’ is the word she uses (145, 156, 161). Submission, in Miss Milner’s book of love, proves affection and is part of the due of the male during courtship, that period of carnival that precedes the constraints of marriage. See Gonda 201. Restraint, as Gonda and Kelly argue, is the true subject of A Simple Story and lends it, as Maria Edgeworth remarked, its special tone (G. Kelly 80; Gonda 184–5; Edgeworth [letter to Elizabeth Inchbald, 14 January 1810], in

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Boaden 2: 153). The peculiar energy of the novel thus seems to enforce a psychological disposition that is at odds with its ideological message. Haggerty’s use of the term ‘debilitating power’ (40) points to the paradox of Miss Milner’s energy. The structure of the book reiterates this shift from exertion to reception, an aspect that critics have tended to read as a fault. Matilda’s situation in this instance forecasts that of Victor Frankenstein, who, having the power that she lacks (or lacking the self-control that she has), creates, in his assertion of self, a monster. See also Swinburne on the importance of apology to the removal of guilt (81–9). See G. Kelly’s remarks on the necessarily constraining effects of Dorriforth’s education as a priest (91). Spacks speaks interestingly in this regard of Lord Elmwood’s ‘verbal limitations,’ which appear to correspond to his restricted emotional range (Desire and Truth 200). That Lord Elmwood’s terseness results in his appearing comical at moments of deep feeling (as in the exchange about the pistols [305]) complicates the situation yet further. See Spacks, Desire and Truth 200. Lord Elmwood’s intricate program of wardship and exclusion as it bears upon Lady Matilda is dictated solely by his wife’s ‘will’ (the document) and the terms of his extravagant revenge against Lady Elmwood, as well as by his explicit desire ‘for [Lady Elmwood’s] sake’ that his heart never be ‘softened by an object [he] might dote on’ (195). His inability properly to construct a relationship with his child stems from his failure to exorcise the most regnant woman in his life, as is proved by his nomination of Lady Matilda in the famous scene on the stairs. As she lapses into a swoon, he calls to her (poignantly) from a past they cannot with any propriety share: ‘Miss Milner – Dear Miss Milner’ (255). The effect is complex: in invoking his wife by her maiden name, he forces his daughter to serve as unwilling (and, luckily, unwitting) erotic proxy to her own mother. Erotic and paternal tenderness blur to resurrect, in effect, the original taboo that invested their relationship: that of father to daughter, priest to (female) acolyte. Lady Matilda’s swoon underscores and testifies to the highly prohibited nature of this union. (The irony is that it is also the most ‘natural.’) Miss Milner’s ‘wit,’ being second-hand, magnifies this retraction of self, as her (compensatory) exercise of energy masks an absence of identity: ‘She had,’ Inchbald writes, ‘no real pretensions [to wit], although the most discerning critic, hearing her converse, might fall into this mistake. – Her replies had all the effect of repartee, not because she possessed those qualities which can properly be called wit, but that what she said was spoken with an energy, an instantaneous and powerful perception of what she said, joined with a real or well-counterfeited simplicity, a quick turn of the eye, and an arch smile of the countenance. – Her words were but the words of others, and, like those of others, put into common sentences;

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but the delivery made them pass for wit, as grace in an ill-proportioned figure, will often make it pass for symmetry’ (16–17). Such a commentary – uncharacteristically direct – is clearly part of Inchbald’s critique of female education (Miss Milner, ‘consigned … to a Protestant boarding-school’ [6], has learned nothing but frivolity, the fashionable ‘pursuits of personal accomplishments’ [6–7]), but it also throws into relief the strangely vital inauthenticity of self with which Inchbald is, I think, more deeply concerned and which finds dramatic focus (yet, tellingly, no ‘representation’) in the episode of the masquerade. 24 Indeed, given the atmosphere of tension (and intention) in the narrative, Miss Milner appears not to understand love at all – like the Wife of Bath, despite momentary glimpses of what it might be like to administer tenderness, she can view it in no other way than as a jockeying for power. Thus, when Lord Elmwood’s coach drives off without him on the morning of their marriage, this event is savoured as a triumph that jostles for priority with the marriage itself. In such instances, Miss Milner seems (like Chaucer’s Wife) to be pathologically locked into seeing love as solely a system of dominance and subservience. 25 The description of Dorriforth on pages 9–10, indeed, calls marked attention to his (considerably unclerical) charm. His ‘tall and elegant’ figure, his ‘dark bright eyes … and a graceful fall in his clerical curls of dark brown hair’ suggest that those whom he ‘interest[s]’ and ‘attract[s]’ (10) are not solely those concerned with his ability to save souls. 26 Miss Fenton, the male-approved epitome of propriety and decorum, is connected with states totally alien to Miss Milner’s mode of being: she is associated with gentility, discretion, serenity, ‘sedateness,’ ‘safety,’ ‘duty,’ and ‘obedience.’ Sandford elevates her as a model of feminine behaviour: ‘If Miss Fenton was admired by Dorriforth, by Sandford she was adored – and instead of giving her as an example to Miss Milner, he spoke of her as of one, endowed beyond Miss Milner’s power of imitation. – Often with a shake of his head and a sigh would he say, “No, I am not so hard upon you as your guardian; I only desire you to love Miss Fenton; to resemble her, I believe, is above your ability”’ (41). Inchbald’s use of Miss Fenton as a foil to Miss Milner serves to emphasize Miss Milner’s humanness (and to hint that prevailing codes of feminine behaviour, in unreasonably stifling emotion, victimize and, in some cases, criminalize those women with passions). In embodying all those socially sanctioned codes of deportment with which Miss Milner has such trouble, Miss Fenton lacks the human touch: ‘That serenity of mind which kept her features in a continual placid form, though enchanting at first glance, upon a second, or third, fatigued the sight for a want of variety; and to have seen her distorted with rage, convulsed with mirth, or in deep dejection had been to her advantage. – But her superior soul appeared above those natural commotions of the mind, and there was more inducement to worship her as

Notes to pages 142–51

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a saint, than to love her as a woman’ (38). Her vapid response to the report of the duel (‘Dear me!’ [66]) and her indifference at the news of her fiancé’s change of heart about their marriage (131) brand her, finally, as ‘torpid’ (131), the anti-type to Miss Milner’s vividness and vulnerability: ‘even Miss Fenton, herself, assured him, her thoughts were more inclined towards the joys of Heaven than earth; and as [the] circumstance [of their broken engagement] would, she believed, induce her to retire to a convent, she thought it a happy, rather than an unhappy event. – Her brother, on whom her fortune devolved if she took this resolution, was exactly of her opinion’ (131). Thus is Miss Fenton unceremoniously and acidly swept aside from Inchbald’s tale of passionate love. The duel and the rape (as well as the cruel play of Miss Milner herself) speak tellingly of the brutality that is held in check by those ‘systems’ that Miss Milner seeks to break down. A recent essay by Eun Kyung Min argues similarly, but adopts a more sympathetic attitude towards Miss Milner’s recoil from the dead language of contract and her embrace of a more vitalistic ethics of love and forgiveness. Dorriforth in his incarnation as wounded lover is a kind of virtual anti-Christ (or anti-priest): he repeatedly refuses all attempts at reconciliation. ‘[R]epentance,’ he reminds Sandford, ‘always comes too late with me’ (295). A similar dilemma attends Lord Elmwood’s decision to reveal to Sandford the fact that Dorriforth has accepted the challenge from Lord Frederick (64). A Simple Story (like Inchbald’s later novel, Nature and Art) plays with the architecture of binary opposition and in so doing emphasizes the contentious nature of its theme and tone. That ideas of obedience (and rebellion) have been confused with larger ones of freedom is suggested by Inchbald’s figuration of personal struggle in the novel as parental rather than marital. Dorriforth, for example, is said to have devised for himself a ‘system’ of politeness (‘as the only means to keep his ward restrained within the same limitations’ [25]). Later, he is said, a victim of ‘negative capability,’ to seek relief from the uncertainty she emanates in determinations and fixed resolutions (52). His discomfort at acting with undue severity is seen in the episode of the ball discussed above (see p. 144), in which he appears to be awkwardly and unwillingly acting the part of the strict guardian. It is echoed by Lady Matilda in the second half of the novel, though in this instance Dorriforth is being supplicated rather than (in theory) forced to pardon: ‘Save me.’ See Swinburne on the importance of reciprocal action in the work of atonement. The wrongdoer must apologize and the victim must forgive. If an apology is offered and not accepted, or if forgiveness is extended without apology, the book of misdeed, as it were, remains open (81–6).

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36 Or, one might argue, she knows herself at last, as her portentous announcement to Dorriforth in her final letter to him suggests: ‘who writes this letter I well know’ (198). But in this case, interestingly (as in that of Clarissa’s posthumous pronouncements), the achievement of selfhood is exclusive, private, and incommunicable. 37 Her refusal to respond to Sandford’s question about her love for Dorriforth (“‘Lord Elmwood, do you love this woman?” “More than my life,” replied his lordship, with the most heartfelt accents. He then turned to Miss Milner – “Can you say the same by him?” She spread her hands over her eyes, and cried, “Oh, heavens!” “I believe you can say so;” returned Sandford’ [177]) cannot, under the circumstances of Inchbald’s studied exploration of such topics, be written off as mere decorum or as part of her complaint about the inadequacies of linguistic expression. But part of the pain and complexity of her novel is that it could be. 38 Thus, for example, she insists to the bemused Miss Woodley upon her preference for ‘a solemn lord chief justice, or a devout archbishop … before a licentious king’ (116). In this instance, Inchbald suggests both Miss Milner’s urge to subject ‘sober’ men to a kind of erotic breakdown and her obsessive need for a theatrical display of her talents in love. Thanatos and threnody here become interestingly fused. 39 See Nora Nachumi on Inchbald’s interest in the physical expression of the passions and the theatrical background that gave such gestures recognizable meaning, 79–115. 40 As Inchbald remarks during the scene in which Dorriforth proposes removing to the country for the season, a ‘vast quantity of resentment, anger, or rage … sometimes boiled in the veins of Miss Milner’ (45). More usually, it is her erotic emotions that Inchbald brings to the surface, however. Whether Inchbald sees any relationship between these types of emotions is unclear. 41 See Marilyn Butler on the importance of self-governance to Inchbald (Jane Austen 43, 96). Gonda suggests that this moral imperative is (confusingly) eroticized in A Simple Story, contending that ‘what Inchbald’s novel offers … is the tension of self-restraint, redefining enjoyment as forbearance, delicately balancing gratification and torture’ (184–5). But here, clearly, the reader is being offered a (moral) cake that he cannot, with any propriety, eat. 42 In a similar passage, Miss Milner talks with Lady Luneham on various subjects but thinks alone on Dorriforth (99). Linguistic discourse here becomes a kind of ‘white noise,’ which masks or screens a speaker’s true concerns and in which the self is not invested. The true communication between the lovers occurs not through language but through tones of voice (eagerness) and gestures (anguish) (108). 43 She is debarred from such an act, cruelly, by Lord Elmwood, whose rage against her effectively keeps her guilty, prohibits forgiveness. In this aggressive act of self-

Notes to pages 159–61

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assertion, Lord Elmwood in essence prohibits the intervention of Christ into the Garden after Man’s fall. After the news of Lady Elmwood’s adultery, he beholds himself, as Inchbald writes, ‘separated from her by a barrier never to be removed’ (186). What Inchbald means here is that in committing adultery, Lady Elmwood has irrevocably ‘crossed the line.’ That barrier, however, is nothing more (nor less, I suppose) than self-imposed. It consists of Lord Elmwood’s pride and his hatred. It is not a physical or a legal barrier. That it remains within his power to remove it (by forgiving her) never seems to be an option he considers. Nor, interestingly, does Inchbald, who appears to accept the fact that Miss Milner’s act is indeed beyond forgiveness, and underscores this idea of moral or emotional limits by not allowing Lord Elmwood to divorce her. In a subtler way, then, Lord Elmwood, in staying connected to Lady Elmwood, causes her the more pain. And in not ‘finishing his business’ with her, he must continue it with their daughter. Some of this ‘business’ involves autocratic exercises of power, some of love. This is the sort of implacability that causes Spacks (and others) to regard Lord Elmwood as monstrous (Desire and Truth 199). As Inchbald declares, Lord Elmwood ‘was no longer the considerate, the forbearing character he formerly was; but haughty, impatient, imperious, and more than ever, implacable’ (215). The reader, of course, in a certain sense, ‘knows better,’ imitating Lady Matilda in ignoring Lord Elmwood’s behaviour and seeing in it something generous and good. (But is it Lord Elmwood here who is generous or is it the Lady Matilda? And why is not such a romantic lens aimed at Miss Milner? ‘Behold me,’ she conjures him, ‘… My whole frame is motionless – my heart beats no more – Look at my horrid habitation, too, – and ask yourself – whether I am an object of resentment?’ [199].) In keeping his resentment alive in this way (when it can no longer have any ‘function,’ as it were), Lord Elmwood in any case harms only himself (and any others who cross his path in a relational way). To harm in the name of ‘right’ is infinitely more destructive than anything the giddy Miss Milner could have devised. From this point of view, Matilda’s ‘underground’ efforts to ‘break’ Lord Elmwood’s rigour offer more hope of changing the status quo. Inchbald’s emphasis throughout A Simple Story is on the relationship between fathers (Fathers) and daughters and on issues of proper guardianship (with all the hierarchical implications thereto appertaining). Intersecting households of celibates and single-parent families seem to her, significantly, the most stable, the most ‘civilized.’ Incidentally, it is interesting that while Lord Elmwood is from the beginning of Volume III ‘excused’ for his heartless neglect of his daughter because we know that at bottom he loves her, no such extenuation is allotted Miss Milner. She is condemned by her actions (adultery – ‘worse,’ apparently, than abandonment, if,

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indeed, it is her actions that convict her) despite her ‘exquisite sensibility,’ and Inchbald puts her to death rather than rewarding her with the earthly happiness extended to Lord Elmwood. Gonda makes interesting remarks on this pattern of surrogacy or substitution in A Simple Story, 186–9. Van Sant notes the centrality of sight and touch to consciousness and to awareness of an outside world (and of touch as the ‘master sense’ of all) (83–97). As H.H. Price observes, ‘A being who lacked both [sight and touch] would have no consciousness of anything which could be called a material world, however acute and well developed his senses of hearing, taste and smell might be’ (i). Thus, Lord Elmwood effectively denies his daughter’s existence by refusing to see or hear her, and Matilda (perhaps more problematically still) cooperates in this erasure of (her) self. See Gonda 190. It works. Upon Lord Elmwood’s recovery from his riding accident, he shows most satisfaction on seeing Miss Woodley, whom he salutes with ‘signs of the sincerest friendship and affection’ (251). This act delights his mentor Sandford, who associates, as he is convinced Lord Elmwood does, Miss Woodley with the Lady Matilda. Critics tend to be unhappy with this finale. See, among others, Breashears 469–70.

6 Frankenstein: Dissociation 1 Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Butler 192 [1831]. Subsequent references are to this edition by page; references to the third edition of Frankenstein (1831), the substantive changes in which appear as Appendix A and Appendix B in Butler’s text, are indicated by date in brackets. 2 Chris Baldick provides a useful summary of the novel’s critical history, 10–62. On issues of Romantic idealism in Frankenstein, see (in addition to those scholars cited by Baldick) Cantor 108–19, 130–2; Leader 171–96; Hustis; Mellor 79–82, 136–7. On the political implications of Frankenstein, see also Cantor 119–22; Mellor 80–8; Malchow 9–40. On Shelley and romantic science, see further Vasbinder; M. Butler, Introd. xv–li; Mellor 89–114; Bewell; Hindle. Additional psychoanalytic readings of Frankenstein include Joseph, ‘Frankenstein’s Dream’ and ‘Virginal Sex’; Dussinger, ‘Kinship’; and L. Zimmerman. 3 Shelley calls the tale a ‘ghost story’ (194–6 [1831]), by which she understands ‘a story … which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart’ (195 [1831]). Such a definition impoverishes her tale by suggesting that its most potent effects arise viscerally, as in much Gothic fiction. Frankenstein does not, in fact, proceed on such a basis, and its

Notes to pages 167–9

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deflection of ‘bodily’ responses comprises part of its peculiar appeal. See below, pp. 169n9, 181. The tale does, of course, exhibit Gothic elements, but, as E.B. Murray has shown, much of the conventionally ‘Gothic’ heightening of Frankenstein was Percy Shelley’s work (51–2). The generic attribution, at least insofar as the contemporary definition of ‘Gothic’ is concerned, is thus tenuous. Shelley, in fact, is largely responsible for shifting the emphasis of the Gothic to a higher, psychological plane (though not on the grounds that she sets out in her introduction). See Behrendt 79. Leader contends that Shelley in Frankenstein not only ‘welcomed Percy Shelley’s contributions’ (171) but also thematized (through a critique of solitary authorship) this sort of authorial cooperation. On Frankenstein as a challenge to modes of writing sanctioned by the patriarchy, see Hodges; Zonana. See Hustis (and others) on the problem of Frankenstein’s disavowal of responsibility for his creation, and Shelley’s allegiance to ‘an ethics of responsible authorship’ (Hustis 855). Grossman offers interesting parallels between Frankenstein’s eschewal of responsibility for his creature and the child custody proceedings that were taking place during the time of Shelley’s composition of Frankenstein and that Percy Shelley eventually lost (65–9). This species of blasphemy has been explored by, among others, B. Johnson; Homans 100–19; and Mellor 38–44, 89–126. See also Moers 90–9. See also Gerhard Joseph’s analysis of this damaging urge to divide: ‘The passion for Edenic purity puts an unbearable strain upon the human psyche. The consequence is a monstrous dualism in which the aspirant towards perfection breaks up into warring elements, joined to one another none knows how: on the one hand, the gross body whose tainted corporeality magnifies itself towards grotesque proportions; on the other, a soul which strains heavenward in its drive to elude corporeal corruption’ (‘Frankenstein’s Dream’ 104). A similar split demonizes Robert Louis Stevenson’s scientist-transgressor Dr Jekyll: learning that, in his words, ‘man is not truly one, but truly two,’ he conceives the project of dissociation that results in the conjuring up of Hyde: ‘If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable’ (82). Here, as with Frankenstein, it is not the duality of man that is at issue, but the proposal to separate the carnal and the spiritual, the civilized and the atavistic, that is highlighted as wrong. Shelley’s tendency to reinforce this sense of the creature-object as manifestation of Frankenstein’s demiurgic urges is seen in her later descriptions of the Creature as ‘the living monument of [Frankenstein’s] presumption and rash ignorance’ (217 [1831]), ‘odious’ (196 [1831]), ‘frightful’ (196 [1831]), ‘hideous’ (197 [1831]) (the latter three adjectives being Shelley’s, not Frankenstein’s). The language of (sexual) rapture, which Frankenstein has detached from Elizabeth, feeds his frenzy to create. The tendency to etherealize Elizabeth is magnified in

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the 1831 edition of Shelley’s tale (see especially 205–9 [1831]), in which Clerval’s connection to the realm of heroic idealism is also similarly stressed. Both characters seem (re)designed to throw the gross physicality of Frankenstein’s achievement into greater relief. And both characters meet their ends as a result of being steered out of the ambit of Frankenstein’s fiercely segregationalist realm of influence. Such abstinence is, in Freud’s analysis, a precondition of artistic production. And if science, as Freud argued, is ‘the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable’ (‘A Special Type of Choice’ 165), Shelley’s scientist devotes himself to the most radical alienation of mind and body. That the dichotomy is, however, in the final analysis untenable is revealed by the degree to which Frankenstein’s scientific language encroaches upon the domain of emotion. (See n. 9 above and n. 30 below.) The figurative here, as elsewhere in Frankenstein, becomes the locus of eruptive and dissonant desire and dread. On Frankenstein’s unpropitious upbringing, see Komisaruk; Best. The descriptors Shelley employs for Frankenstein’s creature run the gamut from filth to engine, a puzzling array of terms that suggests both her reluctance to have the reader visualize the Creature in any detailed way (it is not clear, for instance, what ‘a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived’ [40] might look like) and her confusion about whether the Creature originates viscerally or intellectually. Her descriptions of the Creature repeatedly exhibit a veering away from detail (‘no mortal could support the horror of that countenance’ [40]; ‘his eyes, if eyes they may be called’ [40]), and a vague emphasis on the Creature’s unspeakable ugliness (its creator calls it ‘the filthy mass that moved and talked’ [121]) that suggests an aborted or incomplete birth, as well as (oddly) a connection to the world of automation. In Shelley’s Introduction to the 1831 edition, in particular, Frankenstein’s creature is referred to as a ‘mechanism’ (196), a ‘thing’ (196), the ‘odious handywork’ of a terrified artist (196). Such descriptions reflect growing cultural conceptions of man as a machine (with a body and self that are not synonymous), and the fears attendant on such views. See D. Todd 136–8; Yolton 45: Cottom, Cannibals & Philosophers 83–6. The electronic starting of a machine (which the Creature’s birth resembles) utterly demystifies the creative process. See Cottom on labour in Frankenstein (‘Frankenstein’ 66–7). There is an analogue here to the dazzling lightning bolt that, in Frankenstein’s youth, shatters the oak near the family home. This may, indeed, as Paul Sherwin cleverly suggests (884), be Frankenstein’s ‘primal scene,’ at least insofar as his artistic development is concerned. His failure to register (or at least record) any sentimental response to this cataclysmic event hints, perhaps, at his proclivity towards repeating it. Shelley recapitulates this view in her description of the creative process in the introduction of 1831. She ‘rid[s]’ herself of the nightmare of her fancy by tran-

Notes to pages 175–6

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scribing it into story (196). This is also why Frankenstein never ‘follows through’ on his discovery, neither refining, amending, nor improving upon his astonishing scientific breakthrough. To Alan Rauch, such reluctance to apply his knowledge proves Frankenstein’s moral failure: guilty of hubristic isolationism, the work he produces has ‘neither [social] context nor value’ (98; see also 103–4, 127). Rieder emphasizes the scatological elements of Frankenstein’s project. Johanna M. Smith argues that such ‘emotional quid pro quo’ characterizes and constricts all the human relationships in the novel (319). See also Komisaruk, who expands on the mercenary cast of Frankenstein’s domestic world. This notion is a Godwinian one that particularly informs Caleb Williams, a novel with which Frankenstein has much in common. See also Dussinger on bases of exchange in the Frankenstein family (‘a paradigm of the social contract based on economic terms’) (‘Kinship’ 52) and Grossman on the inability of the legal system to address the relationship of creator and creature (75–82). The guilt of the artist appears to arise, at least in part, from a mistaken association of financial and moral categories. Caroline Beaufort and her adopted daughter are, especially in the 1831 edition, repeatedly described in aerial or ethereal terms. Caroline is described as an ‘angel’ (205 [1831], 54) and Frankenstein’s father is said to ‘worship’ her (204 [1831]). Elizabeth is fairy-like and ethereal, ‘a being heaven-sent … bearing a celestial stamp in all her features’ (206 [1831]), ‘fairer than pictured cherub’ (206 [1831]), ‘saintly,’ with ‘celestial eyes’ [209 [1831]). Both show exemplary piety, resignation, and a curious transcendence over the world of physical suffering and deprivation. Elizabeth, in particular, is pointedly de-physicalized in the revisions to the 1831 edition. She is a ‘creature,’ an ‘apparition,’ a ‘spirit,’ ‘a being heaven-sent,’ and she bears ‘a crown of distinction on her head.’ Her soul, called by Frankenstein ‘saintly,’ is said to shine ‘like a shrine-dedicated lamp in [the Frankensteins’] peaceful home.’ She is the ‘living spirit of love’ and sensibility (206–9 [1831]). Elizabeth is also, like Frankenstein, elevated above the context of manual labour from which she is providentially delivered. She is, as Frankenstein emphatically notes, ‘of a different stock’ (206) than that of the peasant family that has undertaken her care. This is an observation initially about class and then about temperament. Elizabeth is (like her mother) compared to a ‘rose’ among ‘dark-leaved brambles’ (206 [1831]) (a simile meant to aggrandize Elizabeth, but one that hints at Mary Shelley’s dismissal of the lower, working class). (Elizabeth’s ‘radiance’ [206 (1831)] proves her gentility.) Shelley mocks this hierarchical view later, in the monster’s ruminations about the inequities of the class system (96). ‘The saintly soul of Elizabeth,’ Victor recalls, ‘shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home. Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us’ (209 [1831]).

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19 Steven Vine argues that Frankenstein’s relation to Elizabeth (like his relationship to the monster), being ‘framed in terms of specular narcissism,’ discourages the kind of stringent self-evaluation that Frankenstein ought to practice (253). Such self-replication (particularly the fumbling kind in which Frankenstein engages) is not art. See also Irving Massey on Frankenstein’s failure to mount a true inquiry into the self: ‘Frankenstein substitutes [for a Hegelian struggle with the Other] a half-battle, with himself as his double, the monster, and so can remain permanently exempt from the necessity of developing his self-awareness’ (126). The production of art under such circumstances is by definition irresponsible, monstrous. 20 A similarly idealized connection is celebrated by Frankenstein’s understudy, Walton, in the tale of the shipmaster who ‘generous[ly]’ gives up his beloved to another, with financial disbursements underscoring the rejected lover’s noble selfeffacement (9–10). 21 This is in part why Frankenstein may speak freely of his relationship with Clerval, waxing rhapsodic about his sensibility and gentleness (as well as his naïveté and conservatism) (cf. 130), even suggesting (wrongly, of course, but tellingly) at one point that Clerval is ‘the image of [his] former self’ (131) (though such an equation may be apt if Clerval and Frankenstein are regarded as the two ‘sides’ of Percy Shelley). Frankenstein retreats to Clerval when most threatened by Elizabeth, describing him more erotically and feeling his death more strongly. The tribute paid Clerval on page 130 of the novel is unique: no such eulogy is composed for Elizabeth. 22 These effusions are particularly in evidence in the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, as if to highlight Victor’s ingratitude and the poor return he makes to his parents’ indulgence and love. 23 Indeed, Best maintains that Victor is profoundly destabilized by the Frankensteins’ emphasis on a multivalent domestic network, with Justine, Elizabeth, and Clerval, in particular, fulfilling multiple, contradictory roles, and Alphonse Frankenstein retreating from his responsibility to his children. Such anxieties surface in the dream of Elizabeth and the compensatory creation of the monster. (See Best 367–75.) 24 See, for example, Mellor 115–26; Hobbs. Hobbs argues that Victor’s attempt to exorcise the feminine brings on the hysteria that becomes his only avenue of expression. Again, expression and pathology are seen as interchangeable or indistinguishable. The silence (or repression) associated with the scientist’s hysteria also, again, marks his ‘knowledge’ as incommunicable, hence ‘monstrous.’ (See Rauch 102–17.) 25 It is telling in this regard (though not without ‘medical’ or experimental precedent in the study of morbid anatomy), as John Wilson Croker noted, that Frankenstein should choose to collect parts of bodies (rather than an entire body) to form

Notes to pages 180–2

26

27 28

29

30

31

32

33

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his creature in the first place (380). Zakharieva, in her essay on Branagh’s and Whale’s film versions of Frankenstein, argues that the procedure of montage in Frankenstein links the ideology of the novel to the aesthetics of cinema (418–19). This is, of course, a recurrent Romantic theme. See Cantor 130–2. In accordance with Mark Johnson’s definition of meaning (‘an abstract relation between symbolic representations … and objective … reality’ [The Body in the Mind xxii]), Frankenstein, more fundamentally, fails to create meaning at all. The physical that can operate in detachment from the mental in this respect becomes all the more horrific (is, indeed, the monster), not only because it cannot be mentally controlled but also because it represents (if such a term can be used here) the absence of imagination. See Poovey, Proper Lady 114–42 on Shelley’s ambivalent attitude towards female – indeed, any – self-expression. In the case of the unbeholdable monster, such an emphasis encourages sympathy with the Creature. Joseph Kestner discusses the structure of Shelley’s novel as ‘narcissistic’ (reflecting the self-involvement that is also Frankenstein’s emotional flaw). See also Brooks 210. Such a lack of direct engagement with the physical world, interestingly, is symptomatic of the unembodied self, in R.D. Laing’s analysis (82–99). The structure of Frankenstein, which is largely responsible for how this dephysicalization is experienced by the reader, has received much critical attention, its compacted design creating an impression of displacement, dissociation, and centrelessness. (See, among others, Newman 154; Zonana 179–81; Joseph, ‘Frankenstein’s Dream’ 99.) Cf. 23, 30, 34, 38, 209–10 [1831]: ‘ardour’ is the word Shelley uses most frequently to describe Frankenstein’s scientific investigations, and its appearance is multiplied in the third edition. Even after the monster’s career of crime, his moral sense is (at times) still more heightened than that of his creator. Harold Bloom has written compellingly on Frankenstein’s moral failure (121–6). But see Cantor on the Creature’s (and creator’s) blame-shifting at the end of Shelley’s tale, 131–2. The project is, from L. Zimmerman’s perspective, deeply retributive in its genesis and intent: rendered ‘invisible’ by his father’s overbearing presence, Victor lashes back, channeling (and disowning) the rage he feels towards the father into the overtly visible monster. The monster thus is a living tribute, in Zimmerman’s shrewd analysis, to Victor’s ‘inability to “contain himself”’ (139, 157n13). Despite Percy Shelley’s insistence in the Preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein that the novel promotes the virtues of domestic affection (which may or may not be true), and (in the third edition) Victor’s denomination of his story to Walton as moral (203 [1831]), The British Critic concluded, ‘these volumes have neither

224

Notes to page 182

principle, object, nor moral’ (438). John Wilson Croker concurred: ‘it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality’ (385). The Monthly Review took a similar stance, calling Frankenstein ‘an uncouth story … leading to no conclusion either moral or philosophical.’ 34 As Paul Cantor eloquently puts it, ‘In their conviction of the original purity of their intentions, and their belief that only material circumstances thwarted their benevolent impulses, both Frankenstein and the monster maintain to the end the idealist’s moral composure in the face of even his most disastrous attempts to act in the real world’ (132).

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Index

A Note on Terms The terms soul and spirit refer to the immaterial essence of mortal beings, and are employed interchangeably throughout this study in accordance with the usage of the authors I discuss. Mind, also understood as a ‘higher’ power (in keeping with the hierarchical thinking of the period), applies to the intellectual or idea-making faculty, and is often connected with the soul or spirit. Body denotes the corpus, the carcass. Unlike soul, spirit, and mind, it is material. Self, which Locke tied primarily to reflexivity, I use in a looser sense to mean the terms of personhood unique to each individual. Adams, Robert M.: on Swift’s prose style, 58 allegory: in Gulliver’s Travels, 59; and novel, 4, 10, 185; in Robinson Crusoe, 4, 8, 10, 13, 19, 24; in Tom Jones, 100–1 Alter, Robert: on Moll Flanders, 189n19; on Tom Jones, 101–2, 104, 208n21, 209n27 amatory fiction, xvii Austen, Jane, xvii, 186 Bagehot, Walter: on Fielding and Thackeray, 123 Baldick, Chris: on Frankenstein, 168, 218n2 Balfour, Ian: on A Simple Story, 143 Battestin, Martin C.: on Fielding, 98, 99, 100, 108, 207n16, 208n20

Beattie, James: on Swift, 36 Behrendt, Stephen C.: on Frankenstein, 167 Berne, Eric: on Robinson Crusoe, 25 Best, Debra E.: on Frankenstein, 178, 220n10, 222n23 Birdsall, Virginia Ogden: on Defoe, 192nn34, 36 Birrell, Augustine: on Swift, 36 Bloom, Harold: on Frankenstein, 223n31 body: and agency, 186; in art, xii, xvi, 26, 167–8, 172, 185, 186; autonomy of, 65, 67, 85, 155, 175, 183; and civic responsibility, 111–13, 185; and creation of art–object, xvi, 26, 167–9, 171–2, 179–80, 185, 186, 223n26; critical discussions of, xvii; destructive impact on ideas, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 67, 168–70, 172, 179–80;

248

Index

disjunctive relationship to spirit, xii– xv, 4, 5, 8, 25–6, 30, 37–9, 60–1, 90, 92, 166, 168, 177, 184, 185, 194n11, 197n31, 219n7, 219–20n9, 220n10; and expression of emotion, 4, 8, 22–5, 142, 152–8, 190n26, 190–1n28, 216nn39, 42; and goodness, 90–2, 94, 103, 106, 107, 108–9, 111; humour of, 37; and imagination, xiii, 8, 19, 36, 39, 56, 168, 172, 185; language of, 101, 139, 152–8, 216nn39, 42; and love, 90–2, 94–5, 105, 206nn7–8; and mind, xi, xiv, 28, 30, 38–9, 48–9, 66, 74, 85, 92, 100, 119, 142, 166, 168, 170–2, 204n48, 220n10, 223n26; portrayals in Defoe, 21–3, portrayals in Fielding, 97–101; portrayals in Inchbald, 153, 155, 156–7; portrayals in Richardson, 65–6; portrayals in Shelley, 179, 180, 182, 218–19n3, 219–20n9, 220n11, 221n17, 223n29; portrayals in Swift, 34–7, 39–42, 44–5, 47, 50, 186, 196n29; and problem of mind, 27, 31, 32, 38, 47, 48–9, 172; and prose style, 57–9, 117–23, 180–1; and Puritanism, xii; realization of virtue in, 64–5, 92, 95, 97–101, 207n12; and self in Defoe, xiv, xvi, 4, 8, 24–5; and self in Richardson, 64, 66, 67, 74, 76, 199n4; and self in Swift, 45–6, 55; and sentimental novel, 125, 152, 186; sexualized, 101, 153–4; and social contract, xiii, xv, 90–1, 92, 124, 125–6, 142–50, 186; and soul in Clarissa, 64, 66; and soul in Defoe, 25–6, 67, 186; and spectacle, xvi, 75–6, 92, 186 Boucé, Paul-Gabriel: on Tom Jones, 91, 205n1 Braudy, Leo: on Clarissa, 201n20 Brooks, Peter, xvii

Brown, Homer O.: on Defoe, 188n8, 191n32, 192n36 Brown, Norman O.: on Swift’s ‘excremental vision,’ 37 Bullitt, John M.: on Swift, 198n41 Bunyan, John, 10, 184–5. See also Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) Burney, Frances, xvii, 186 Burns, Robert: on Richardson, 123 Butler, Janet: on Clarissa, 204n48 Butler, Marilyn: on Inchbald, 216n41 Byron, Lord: on Swift, 194n7 Cantor, Paul A: on Frankenstein, 180, 223n31, 224n34 Carlton, Peter J.: on Tom Jones, 206n8 Castle, Terry: on Clarissa, 202n27, 203n40, 204n42; on A Simple Story, 126–7, 128, 130, 143, 144, 211n7 Clarissa (Richardson), xiv–xv, xvi, 62–88: action in, 63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 79, 81–3, 85, 88, 104, 111, 114, 203n40, 204nn43, 46–8; agency in, xiv, 68, 79, 143, 203n40, 204n47; autonomy of body in, 64, 67, 85; autonomy of self in, 66, 68, 72, 86, 199–200n9, 203n38, 204n45; body and self in, 64, 66, 67, 74, 76, 199n4; Clarissa as embodiment of virtue in, 64–5; difficulty of mutuality in, 68, 77–8, 87; freedom in, 67–8, 70–1, 72, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 199n6, 204n45; imagination in, 71–2, 199n5; Johnson on, 72; law in, 71, 83–4, 201n17, 204n47; Lovelace’s desire for absolution in, 69–71, 77, 86–7, 200n13; permeability of self in, 64, 65, 73–4, 79, 114; power in, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71–2, 78, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 125, 188n6, 199nn7–8, 203n40, 201nn18, 21, 23,

Index 204n42; privacy of body in, 65, 186; Puritan self-examination in, 201n24; rape in, 66, 76, 79, 80–1, 83–4, 201n17, 201–2n25, 203n35; responsibility in, 111, 204n47; sexuality in, 65, 69, 71, 73, 76, 81, 84, 200n10, 201–2n25, 202–3nn34–5; theatricality in, xiv, xvi, 63, 75–8, 84, 86, 124, 186, 188n6, 203nn37, 39, 212n15; volition in, xiv–xv, 64, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80–3, 85–7, 202nn30, 32–3, 204n48. See also Richardson, Samuel Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: on allegory, 6; on Defoe, 15, 16; on Fielding, 102; on Fielding and Richardson, 207n14; on Swift, 195n15 Cottom, Daniel: on Robinson Crusoe, 192n36 Crane, R.S.: on Gulliver’s Travels, 194n12 Croker, John Wilson: on Frankenstein, 222–3n25, 223–4n33 Cumberland, Richard: on Tom Jones, 122–3 Damrosch, Leopold, Jr: on Clarissa, 82, 205n49; on Defoe, 4, 7, 11, 12, 18; on Puritanism and novel form, xiv; on Tom Jones, 209n25 Davis, Herbert: on Swift, 198n39 Defoe, Daniel, xi, xii, xiii–xiv, xv, 184–5, 186: allegory vs mimesis in, 4, 10; anti-metaphoricality in, 16, 189n18, 190n20; circumstantiality in, 11–12, 14–17; Colonel Jack, 189n12, 190n25, 190–1n28; A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, 191n30; An Essay Upon Projects, 12; Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 11, 22, 24, 191n30; and Fielding, 26, 92,

249

96, 113, 122, 123, 184, 189n17; on hierarchy of soul and body, 25–6, 67, 186; ideological programs of, 184; imagination in, 5, 15–16, 191–2n33; and Inchbald, 153, 155, 158; literalization in, 16, 189nn18–19; Moll Flanders, 11, 189nn13, 16, 19; ‘moral’ vs ‘story’ in, 5, 10–11, 189n13; ‘objective’ style, xiii, 189–90nn18–20; ‘Portraiture of the Miseries of a Traitor,’ 190nn27–8; prose style of, xiii, 12–13, 14–16, 189nn18–19; and Puritanism, xi, xii, xiv, 4, 5, 9, 185; realism of, 14–15; and Richardson, xiii, xiv, xv, 26, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71–2, 184, 188nn5–6, 191n31; Robinson Crusoe, xiii–xiv, 3–26; Roxana, 11, 189n11, 190–1n28; Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, 10, 25; and Shelley, 26, 166, 169, 174, 177; and spiritual autobiography, xi, 4; and Swift, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 18, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 57, 59, 64, 65, 68, 184, 185, 192n34, 193nn5–6, 197n31; technical skill vs art in, 26. See also Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) Delany, Patrick: on Swift, 31 De Quincey, Thomas: on Defoe, 15–16 Dixsaut, Jean: on Gulliver’s Travels, 44 Donoghue, Denis: on Swift, 37, 57–8, 60, 195–6n22, 197n34, 198n39 Donoghue, Frank: on Robinson Crusoe, 188n6 Doody, Margaret Anne: on Clarissa, 68, 200n14, 204n47 Dussinger, John A.: on Clarissa, 75, 201–2n25; on Frankenstein, 221n16 Eagleton, Terry: on Clarissa, 72, 75, 79, 199–200n9, 201nn21, 23, 202n33

250

Index

Edgeworth, Maria: on A Simple Story, 155, 211n6, 212–13n18 Ehrenpreis, Irvin: on Gulliver’s Travels, 194n12; on Swift, 37, 39 Elliott, Robert C.: on Gulliver’s Travels, 56 Ellis, Kate: on Frankenstein, 176 Empson, William: on Swift, 38 Fekete, John: on Don Pedro, 31, 192n2 Ferguson, Frances: on Clarissa, 201–2n25 Fielding, Henry, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 26, 32, 184, 185, 186; Amelia, 92, 94, 99, 104, 186; The Champion, 96; and Defoe, 26, 92, 96, 113, 122, 123, 184, 189n17; ‘An Essay on Conversation,’ 91; ‘An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,’ 95, 206n9; and Inchbald, 92, 101, 104, 159; Johnson on, 91, 206–7n11; Joseph Andrews, 91, 98, 103, 104, 111, 205n5; and Richardson, xii, xiv, 65, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98–9, 101, 104, 108, 111, 113, 114, 119, 123, 184, 185, 205n6, 206–7n11, 207nn12, 14–15; and Shelley, 101, 111, 183; and Smollett, 123; and Swift, 32, 90, 92, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 184; Tom Jones, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 89–124. See also Tom Jones (Fielding) Flynn, Carol Houlihan: on Swift, 37 Foster, James O.: on Defoe, 187n1 Frankenstein (Shelley), xvi, 166–83; artistic vs domestic in, 173–4; attitude towards feminine in, 176–9, 222nn21, 24, 223n27; autonomy of art object in, 182–3; body and art in, xvi, 167–9, 172, 179–80, 185, 186, 223n26; creative imagination in, 168–9, 172, 180,

181, 185; creative process in, 166–7, 170–4, 180, 219n8, 220n11, 220– 1n14, 222n19, 222–3n25; disjunction of body and soul in, 168, 177, 219n7, 219–20nn9–10; early commentary on, 223–4n33; freedom and confinement in, 166, 167–8, 174, 179; and Gothic, 167, 218–19n3; idealism in, 167, 169, 174, 177–8, 179, 180–1, 218n2, 219–20n9, 222n20, 224n34; issues of gender in, 170, 176, 219n6, 222n24; Marxist critics on, 171; moral evasion in, 170, 173–4, 181–3, 220–1n14, 223n31; Percy Shelley and, 167, 218– 19nn3–5, 222n21, 223–4n33; retreat from physicality in, 168–9, 170, 176–7, 179, 180–1, 220n10, 221n17, 223n29; structure of, 181, 223nn28–9. See also Shelley, Mary Frega, Donnalee: on Clarissa, 199–200n9 Freud, Sigmund, 72, 126, 201n19, 220n10 Furbank, P.N., and W.R. Owens: on Defoe’s prose style, 12, 13 Fussell, Paul, Jr: on Swift, 44, 198n38 Géracht, Maurice A.: on Gulliver’s Travels, 192n2 Golden, Morris: on Fielding, 207n18 Gonda, Caroline: on A Simple Story, 130, 134, 212–13n18, 216n41, 218n48 Gothic fiction, xvii, 126, 167, 211n4, 218–19n3 Gray, Christopher W.: on Defoe’s imagination, 16, 17–18, 189n19 Grossman, Jonathan H.: on Frankenstein, 219n5, 221n16 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), xiv, xv, 27–61; antipathy of ideal and real in, 29, 32, 33, 37, 61; binary view in, 33,

Index 47–8, 194n7; bodily harm in, 40, 44, 45, 196n24; body as basis of humour in, 37, 39; choice in, 33, 39, 51, 54, 55, 194nn7–8, 197n35; compromise in, 28, 29, 49–50, 193n3, 194n8; depictions of body in, 34–7, 39–42, 44–5, 47, 50, 186, 196n29; Don Pedro in, 30–1, 55–6, 61, 192–3nn3–4; early commentary on, 31, 36; freedom and confinement in, 33, 43, 47; Gulliver’s self-contempt in, 41, 45–6, 47, 55; Gulliver’s self-importance in, 32, 43, 45, 46–7, 55, 195n21; lists in, 60, 117, 122; literalism in, 27–8, 31, 39–40, 48, 59, 60, 61, 198n41; material vs intellectual in, 30, 37–8, 48–9; and novel, 28–9, 32, 42, 44, 60–1, 184, 185, 193n4; polarization in, 33, 51, 53, 197n33; pragmatism in, 30, 60–1; problems of ‘translation’ in, 28, 29–30, 57, 60; ranking or seriation in, 33, 194n12; rejection of illusion in, 57, 59; and satire, xiii; secular focus of, 33, 61; and travel account, 27, 29, 42; unfitness of human body in, 40–1, 44, 50; vulnerability in, 42–3, 44, 47. See also Swift, Jonathan Haggerty, George E.: on A Simple Story, 131, 211n4, 211–12n12, 212–13n18 Halewood, William H.: on Robinson Crusoe, 5 Hardy, Barbara: on Defoe, 189n13 Harris, Jocelyn: on Lovelace, 79, 199n6 Hawkins, Sir John: on Tom Jones, 109 Haywood, Eliza: Fantomina, 186 Hazlitt, William: on Defoe, 191–2n33; on Tom Jones, 123 Hobbs, Colleen: on Frankenstein, 222n24

251

Humphreys, A.R.: on Swift and Fielding, 121 Hunter, J. Paul: on Gulliver’s Travels, 28; on Puritanism and novel form, xiv; on Robinson Crusoe, 4; on Tom Jones, 90–1 Hustis, Harriet: on Frankenstein, 219n5 Huxley, Aldous: on Swift, 37, 51, 194n11 Hynes, Peter: on Clarissa, 143 Inchbald, Elizabeth, xii, xiii, xv–xvi, 185, 186: and Defoe, 153, 155, 158; and Fielding, 92, 101, 104, 159; Nature and Art, 215n31; and Richardson, 68, 76, 79, 125, 173, 212n15, 216n36; and Shelley, 125, 166, 177, 183, 213n19; A Simple Story, xv–xvi, 125–65. See also Simple Story, A (Inchbald) Jager, Eric: on Robinson Crusoe, 188n5 James, E. Anthony: on Defoe’s prose style, 12, 190n21 Jeaffreson, J. Cordy: on Defoe, 12 Jeffrey, Francis: on Swift, 31, 193n3 John Climacus: on the will, 87 Johnson, Mark, 223n26 Johnson, Samuel: on Clarissa, 72; on Gulliver’s Travels, 36, 39, 194–5n14; on ‘mixed characters’ in fiction, 208n23; on Richardson and Fielding, 91, 206–7n11; on Swift, 36 Joseph, Gerhard: on Frankenstein, 176, 180, 219n7 Kaul, A.N.: on Fielding, 207n16 Kelly, Gary: on A Simple Story, 210– 11n2, 211n5, 212–13n18, 213n21 Kestner, Joseph: on Frankenstein, 223n28

252

Index

Kettle, Arnold: on Defoe, 189n14 Keymer, Tom: on Clarissa, 63, 199n3 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark: on Clarissa, 202n26; on Tom Jones, 205nn1, 3 Knight, G. Wilson: on Swift, 37 Komisaruk, Adam: on Frankenstein, 220n10, 221n15 Koppel, Gene S.: on Tom Jones, 206n8 Kramnick, Jonathan: on Clarissa, 203n40 Laing, R.D.: on schizophrenia, 199n8, 203n38; on unembodied self, 188n7, 223n29 Lamb, Charles: on Defoe’s fiction, 14 Lasch, Christopher: on nostalgia, 202n26 Lawrence, D.H.: on Fielding, 206n7; on Swift, 30–1 Leader, Zachary: on Frankenstein, 219n4 Leavis, F.R.: on Swift, 31 Lewis, Matthew G., 141, 186 Lindholm, Charles: on charisma, 107 Locke, John, 14 Lockwood, Thomas: on style of Tom Jones, 209–10n30 Lowell, James Russell: on Swift, 57 Lutwack, Leonard: on style of Tom Jones, 209–10n30 Macaulay, Thomas Babington: on Defoe, 15 Maddox, James H., Jr: on Robinson Crusoe, 10, 188n4, 191n30 Maresca, Thomas E.: on Swift, 56 Marx, Karl: on alienated labour, 171; on Defoe, 11 Massey, Irving: on Frankenstein, 222n19 McKeon, Michael: on Defoe, 187n1 McMaster, Juliet, xvi

Miller, Henry Knight: on Tom Jones, 207n18, 208nn21–2, 209–10n30 Milton, John, 70, 80, 83, 134, 151, 183, 204n45 Min, Eun Kyung: on A Simple Story, 215n28 Murry, John Middleton: on Fielding, 92, 206n7; on Swift’s ‘excremental vision,’ 37, 194n10 Nachumi, Nora: on Inchbald, 216n39 novel (genre): accommodation of real and ideal in, 19, 28, 32, 60–1; and allegory, 4, 10, 185; centrality of body to, xi, xiii, xiv, xvii, xviii, 32, 60–1, 122–3, 184–6; didacticism in, 184; and fallen world, 60; Gulliver’s Travels and, 28–9, 193n4; and love, 205n1; and Puritanism, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii, 4–5, 185; and romance, 4; and satire, xii, xiii, 28, 32, 185, 193n4; and theatre, xvi, 76, 88, 186 Nussbaum, Felicity A: on Swift, 56 Ong, Walter J., S.J.: on Gulliver’s Travels, 53; on Swift, 194n8, 198n38 Orwell, George: on Swift, 36–7, 51 Park, Julie: on Clarissa, 199n4 Patey, Douglas Lane: on Gulliver’s Travels, 195n15 Paulson, Ronald: on A Simple Story, 145 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan): and Robinson Crusoe, 6, 19, 185; as prototype for novel, 185. See also Bunyan, John Pollak, Ellen: on Swift, 53–4. Poovey, Mary: on Richardson and Fielding, 207n12; on Shelley, 181, 223n27 Preston, John: on Lovelace, 68

Index Price, H.H.: on touch, 218n49 Puritanism: and body, xii; and Defoe, xi, xii, xiv, 4, 5, 9, 185; and novel, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii, 4–5, 185; and Richardson, xvi, 201n24; and Fielding, 209n25 Quintana, Ricardo: on Swift, 58 Rauch, Alan: on Frankenstein, 220– 1n14, 222n24 Rawson, Claude: on Swift, 60; on Tom Jones, 205–6n6 Renaker, David: on Gulliver’s Travels, 48 Richardson, Samuel, xi, xii, xiii, xiv–xv, xvi, 184, 185, 186: Clarissa, xiv–xv, xvi, 62–88; and Defoe, xiii, xiv, xv, 26, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 184, 188nn5–6, 191n31; and Fielding, xii, xiv, 65, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98–9, 101, 104, 108, 111, 113, 114, 119, 123, 184, 185, 205n6, 206–7nn11–12, 14–15; and Inchbald, 68, 76, 79, 125, 173, 212n15, 216n36; Johnson on, 206–7n11; and Puritanism, xvi, 210n24; and Shelley, 64, 72, 166, 173; and Swift, xv, 33, 64, 65, 66, 68, 90. See also Clarissa (Richardson) Richetti, John J.: on Clarissa, 74, 203n39, 204n46; on Defoe, 4, 187–8n3 Rieder, John: on Frankenstein, 220–1n14 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 190n20 Robins, H.F.: on Robinson Crusoe, 191n31 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), xiii–xiv, 3–26; allegory in, 4, 8, 10, 13, 19, 24; allegory vs mimesis in, 4, 10; allusiveness in, 11, 18; approxima-

253

tion in, 17; autonomous narrative in, 11, 15–16; biblical readings in, 9–10; circumstantiality in, 14–17, 19; Crusoe’s self-portrayals in, 21–2, 25, 188nn5–6; dislocatory relationship of body and soul in, xii–xiv, 4, 5, 8, 25–6; displacement in, 8, 24–5; expression of emotion in, 7–8, 22–5, 190nn26, 27, 190–1n28; ‘false adversatives’ in, 13–14; freedom and constraint in, 8–10; generic questions in, 4–5; models of self in, 7–8, 19–20, 24, 25, 26, 188nn5, 6, 7, 190n23, 191n29, 192n36; narrative momentum of, 11–12; portrayal of body in, 21–2; prose style in, 12–19, 189nn17–19; psychology in, 6–8, 24; schismatic model of self and body in, xiv, xvi, 4, 8, 24–5, 76; schizophrenia in, 8; secular focus of, 11; self-knowledge in, 25, 26; and spiritual autobiography, xi, 4; spiritual vs dramatic emphasis in, 4–6, 11, 18–19, 187nn2–3; textual self in, 7, 25, 188n5; theatricality in, xvi, 5, 7–8, 23, 25, 26, 76, 96; Tournier on, 17, 19, 191n29; ‘venting’ in, 23–4; view of imagination in, 4, 5, 19, 71–2, 185; violence in, 25. See also Defoe, Daniel Rodino, Richard H.: on Swift, 53, 197n35, 197–8n37 Rogers, Katharine M.: on A Simple Story, 210–11n2 Rogers, Pat: on Defoe’s prose style, 13–15, 17 Roscoe, W.C.: on Defoe, 12, 19, 26, 192n36 Ross, John F.: on Don Pedro, 192n2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on Robinson Crusoe, 5

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Index

Said, Edward: on Gulliver’s Travels, 195–6n22 satire, 31, 32, 36, 57; and novel, xii, xiii, 32, 185, 193n4; and Swift, xii, xiii, 28, 31, 32, 39, 193n4, 197n35, 198n41 Schmidgen, Wolfram: on Robinson Crusoe, 190n23; on Defoe’s descriptions, 189n18; on Fielding’s style, 210n31 Schorer, Mark: on Defoe, 16 Scott, Sir Walter: on Defoe’s prose style, 12, 14; on structure of Defoe’s fiction, 189n15; on Swift, 193n3, on Tom Jones, 205–6n6 Seidel, Michael: on Gulliver’s Travels, 28, 193n6 self: bifurcated models of, xiv, 4, 8, 22, 25–6, 168, 219n7; and body in Defoe, 22, 24–5; and body in Richardson, 64, 66, 67, 74, 76, 199n4; and body in Shelley, 219n7; corporeal, 184–5; embodied, 125; inauthentic, 212n15, 213–14n23; permeability of, 64, 65, 73–4, 79, 114; textual, 7, 25, 188n5 self-examination, 7, 163, 201n24 self-expression, 132, 133 self-knowledge, 125, 130, 216n36; sentimentalism, xii, xv, xvii, 125, 126, 127, 128, 139, 152, 160, 165, 185, 186, 211n9 Shelley, Mary, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, 185, 186: and authorship, 166–7, 219n5, 220–1n14, 223n27; and Defoe, 26, 166, 169, 174, 177; and Fielding, 101, 111, 183; Frankenstein, xi, xvi, 166–83; and Inchbald, 125, 166, 177, 183, 213n36; and Richardson, 64, 72, 166, 173; and Swift, 35, 36, 49, 51, 169, 172, 181. See also Frankenstein (Shelley)

Sherbo, Arthur: on Fielding’s style, 209n27 Sheridan Thomas: on Yahoos, 197n31 Sherwin, Paul: on Frankenstein, 172, 173, 176, 220n13 Sill, Geoffrey M.: on Robinson Crusoe, 5, 7 Simple Story, A (Inchbald), xv–xvi, 125–65: blushing in, 139, 153–5; Castle on, 126, 127, 143, 144, 210n1, 210–11n2, 211n7, 212n15; contention in, 125, 133, 134–5, 136–8, 142, 143, 147, 150–1, 215n31; Edgeworth on, 155, 211n6, 212–13n18; embodied self in, 125; energy in, 125, 127, 128, 129–30, 134, 135, 142, 145, 150, 155, 165, 212–13n18, 213–14n23; female desire in, 127, 137–8, 144, 153–4, 160, 162–4; female education in, 129, 210–11n2, 212n13, 213–14n23; freedom in, 68, 126, 127, 129, 130–3, 135, 143, 145, 150–1, 210n1, 210–11n2, 212n15, 215n32; gender issues in, 125–6, 133, 134, 141, 145, 158, 159, 165, 210n2, 211n9; gestures in, xvi, 142, 152–8, 216nn39, 42; language in, 142, 152–8, 215n28, 216nn37, 42; mutability in, 141–2; physical contact in, 161–4, 218n49; power in, 125, 131, 134, 137, 141, 144–5, 154, 165, 210n1, 212–13n18, 213n19, 214n24, 216–17n43; ‘proxy’ in, 131, 161–2, 165, 213n22, 218nn48, 50; selfabnegation in, 127, 129, 159, 218n49; self-assertion in, 127, 128, 129, 152, 159, 160, 161, 213n19, 213–14n23, 216–17n43; self-expression in, xv, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 138, 153, 210–11n2, 212n15; self-knowledge in, 125, 130, 163, 216n36; sentimental-

Index ism in, 125, 126, 128, 139, 152, 160, 165, 211n9; social contract in, xiii, xv, 79, 92, 125–6, 130, 142–50, 157, 186, 215n28; Spacks on, 126, 210–11nn1– 2, 213n21, 216–17n43; structure of, 126–8, 158, 210–11n2, 212–13n18, 215n31; theatricality in, 125, 130, 133, 212n15, 216nn38–9; vows and promises in, 143–50, 157, 215n28; Wollstonecraft on, 127, 210–11n2, 211n9, 212n13. See also Inchbald, Elizabeth Smith, Johanna M.: on Frankenstein, 221n15 Smollett, Tobias George, xvii, 186; and Swift, 32 Spacks, Patricia Meyer: on A Simple Story, 126, 210n1, 213n21, 216–17n43 Spencer, Jane: on A Simple Story, 210–11n2 spiritual autobiography: and Defoe, xi, 4 Staël, Germaine de: on Tom Jones, 205n1 Starr, G.A.: on Robinson Crusoe, 4, 189n19 Stein, William Bysshe: on Robinson Crusoe, 191n31 Stephen, Leslie: on Defoe’s prose style, 11, 189n18; on Defoe’s religious intentions, 11; on satire, 57 Sterne, Laurence, xvii, 186 Stevenson, John Allen: on Clarissa, 202n30, 203n35; on Tom Jones, 206n10 Stevenson, Robert Louis: ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ 219n7 Suarez, Michael F., S.J.: on Clarissa, 201–2n25 Swift, Jonathan, xi–xvi, xviii, 185, 186; as anti-poet, 58, 198n39; antipathy

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of ideal and real in, 29, 32, 33, 37, 61; ‘Baucis and Philemon,’ 56, 58; ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,’ 30, 50; ‘Cassinus and Peter,’ 30, 56; ‘corporeal’ imagination of, xiii, 35, 36, 39, 56–7, 185, 198n38; and Defoe, 18, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32–3, 57, 59, 61, 192n34, 193nn5–6, 197n31; ‘A Description of a City Shower,’ 59, 195–6n22, 197n34; disunity of body and soul in, 38, 194n11, 197n31; enlightenment in, 29–30, 35–6; An Examination of Certain Abuses, 37, 49, 194n10; feminist critics on, 37; and Fielding, 32, 90, 92, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 184; Gulliver’s Travels, xiv, xv, 27–61; Huxley on, 37, 194n11; ideological programs of, 184; intellectualism of, 37; lists in, 60, 117, 122; ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room,’ 29, 30, 34, 35–6, 37, 56, 195–6n22, 197n34; Lawrence on, 30–1; material vs intellectual in, 30, 37–8, 48–9; The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, xviii, 38, 60, 195n18, 198n38; metamorphosis in, 56, 58–9; A Modest Proposal, 54; ‘objective’ style of, xiii, 57–8, 198n40; ‘outline’ in, 32, 58, 60, 198n40; poems to Stella, 31, 50, 54, 57; pragmatism in, 30, 60–1; prose style of, 57–9, 60; rejection of illusion in, 57, 59; and Richardson, xv, 33, 64, 65, 66, 68, 90; ‘scatalogical’ poems, 36, 194n10, 196–7n29; and satire, xii, xiii, 28, 31, 32, 39, 193n4, 197n35, 198n41; and Shelley, 35, 36, 49, 51, 169, 172, 181; ‘Strephon and Chloe,’ 29; surfaces in, 58, 60; A Tale of a Tub, 195n18; and Yeats, 35, 56. See also Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)

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Index

Swinburne, Richard: on atonement, 129, 151, 213n20, 215n35 Taine, Hippolyte A.: on Defoe, 15, 16; on Fielding, 92, 209n29; on Swift, 36, 53, 57, 59, 198n39 Tallman, Warren: on Gulliver’s Travels, 196–7n29 Thackeray, William Makepeace: on Gulliver’s Travels, 36, 37, 51, 194n9, 194–5n14; on Swift, 193n3; on Swift and Fielding, 123 theatricality, 191n31; in Clarissa, xiv, xvi, 63, 75–8, 84, 86, 124, 186, 188n6, 203nn37, 39, 212n15; and novel, xvi, 76, 88, 186; in Robinson Crusoe, xvi, 5, 7–8, 23, 25, 26, 76, 96; in A Simple Story, 125, 130, 133, 212n15, 216nn38–9 Theweleit, Klaus, 25, 190n22 Tom Jones (Fielding), xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 89–124: centrality of body to, 90, 91, 186; Coleridge on, 102, 207n14; comic emphasis of, 90, 92, 96, 97, 117, 119, 121, 206–7n11, 207n18, 209n25; early commentary on, 102, 205–6n6, 208n23; energy in, 92, 101–4, 123, 207nn13, 15; Fielding’s style in, 117–23, 189n17, 208–9n24, 209n27, 209–10nn29–31; gallantry in, 106–7; generosity in, 91, 92, 94, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 123; goodness in, 90, 91, 92, 94–5, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102–3, 106, 107, 108–11, 114–17, 208n20; historicity of, 123, 210n31; importance of action in, 90, 92, 101, 102–3, 119, 207nn13, 16, 209n25; judging character in, 113–16, 206nn9–10; love in, 89–95, 105, 205–6nn1–6, 207n18, 209n25; matri-

mony in, 92–4; moral attitude towards body in, 185; moral responsibility in, 109, 110–13; ‘outsides’ in, 95–101, 206n9, 206–7n11; physical beauty in, 92, 95, 97–101, 207n12; physical love in, 90–2, 94–5, 100, 102, 104–8, 206nn7–8, 207–8nn17–19; platonic love in, 100, 106, 120; prudence in, 96, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 205n1; Puritanism in, 209n25; real and ideal in, xv, 32, 97, 98, 100–1, 117–20, 124; Richardson on, 205–6n6; shifts of perspective in, 118–22, 123; social focus of, 90, 91, 92, 96–7, 122–4, 207n13, 210nn31–2; Sophia as embodiment of virtue in, 65, 97, 98, 100–1; spiritual love in, 92, 105, 106; virtue in, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 109, 110, 114–15, 117, 208n21, 209n25. See also Fielding, Henry Tournier, Michel, 17, 19, 191n29 Tyler, Thomas: on Gulliver’s Travels, 53 Van Ghent, Dorothy: on Clarissa, 201–2n25; on Defoe, 14; on Tom Jones, 209n27 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 218n49 Vickers, Ilse: on Defoe, 192n35 Vieth, David: on Swift, 59 Vine, Steven: on Frankenstein, 222n19 Ward, Candace: on A Simple Story, 211n9 Watkins, W.B.C.: on Swift, 31, 37–8 Watt, Ian: on Robinson Crusoe, 4, 6, 26, 191n32; on Tom Jones, 101, 206n8, 206–7n11 Wehrs, Donald R.: on Clarissa, 82, 205n49 Weinstein, Arnold: on Clarissa, 205n50

Index Wells, H. G.: on Fielding, 209n29 Wendt, Allan: on Clarissa, 201–2n25; on Fielding, 97, 98 Wheeler, Roxann: on Robinson Crusoe, 190n24 Williams, Kathleen M.: on Gulliver’s Travels, 192n2, 197n35 Wilson, Charles Henry: on Swift, 198n40 Wilson, Walter: on Defoe, 187–8n3, 189n13 Wilt, Judith: on Lovelace, 199n7 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin: on Clarissa, 73, 201n24, 202n28 Wollstonecraft, Mary: on A Simple Story, 126, 127, 210–11n2, 211n9, 212n13

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Woolf, Virginia: on Defoe, 11–12, 14–15; on Robinson Crusoe, 19 Wright, Andrew: on Tom Jones, 207n13 Yeats, William Butler: and Swift, 35, 56 Zakharieva, Bouriana: on Frankenstein, 222–3n25 Zimmerman, Everett: on Robinson Crusoe, 11, 25; on Swift, 198n42 Zimmerman, Lee: on Frankenstein, 178, 223n32 Zomchick, John P.: on Tom Jones, 208n21