Romanticism and the Object (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Rom a n t ic ism a n d t h e Obj ec t

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Periodicals, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer FORTHCOMING TITLES: From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson

Rom a n t ic ism a n d t h e Obj ec t Edited by

Larry H. Peer

ROMANTICISM AND THE OBJECT

Copyright © Larry H. Peer, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61738–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romanticism and the object / edited by Larry H. Peer. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–61738–4 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Symbolism in literature. 4. Object (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Peer, Larry H. PR575.S9R66 2009 821’.70915—dc22

2009013422

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated, first of all, to Romanticism scholars around the world whose interests lie in finding the larger arcs of development behind particulars, but without ignoring cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary details; secondly, to Fran Botkin and Erin Goss for their grasp of how a scholarly gathering should be conducted; and thirdly, to Janet Peer’s uncommon common sense and general excellence.

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C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments

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Notes on the Contributors

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Introduction: Romanticizing the Object Larry H. Peer

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“Things Forever Speaking” and “Objects of All Thought” Marilyn Gaull

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“Perfectly Compatible Objects”: Mr. Pitt Contemplates Britain and South America Jocelyn M. Almeida

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Children as Subject and Object: Shelley v. Westbrook Lisbeth Chapin

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“I’ll Contrive a Sylvan Room”: Certainty and Indeterminacy in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head, the Fables, and Other Poems (1807) Mark K. Fulk

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“A Better Guide in Ourselves”: Objects, Romantic-Protestant Ethics, and Fanny Price’s Individualism Rodney Farnsworth The Literal and Literary Circulation of Amelia Curran’s Portrait of Percy Shelley Diane Long Hoeveler

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Shelley Incinerated Michael Gamer

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Keats and the Impersonal Craft of Writing Magdalena M. Ostas

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contents

10 “Tun’d to Hymns of Perfect Love”: The Anglican Liturgy as Romanic Object in John Keble’s The Christian Year Chene Heady

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11 Journeys to the East: Shelley and Novalis William S. Davis

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12 Weighing It Again Charles J. Rzepka

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Bibliography

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Index

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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

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he production of this book would not have been possible without the detailed professionalism of the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, the support of colleagues in the International Conference on Romanticism, the suggestions of several anonymous readers, and the technical expertise of Matthew Perry. I thank them all for their generosity. Three of the book’s chapters have appeared, some in an earlier form, in The Wordsworth Circle, volume xxxvix, 1–2 (2008). I am grateful to the editorial staff of that journal for permission to use the work of Michael Gamer, Marilyn Gaull, and Diane Long Hoeveler.

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No t e s on t h e C on t r i bu t or s

Jocelyn M. Almeida is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published in European Romantic Review and has contributed chapters in other edited collections. Lisbeth Chapin is Assistant Professor of English at Gwynedd-Mercy College (Pennsylvania). Her publications include a number of ecocritical essays, particularly in relation to Shelley. William S. Davis is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Colorado College. His work includes publications on the German Romantics and their relationship with British culture. Rodney Farnsworth is Professor in the Department of English and Linguistics at Indiana University—Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He has published in Film Quarterly, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Musical Quarterly, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. His books include The Infernal Return and Mediating Order and Chaos. Mark K. Fulk is Associate Professor in the English Department at Buffalo State College, SUNY. His book Understanding May Sarton is joined by essays on Dryden, Austen, and Phillip Roth, among others. Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His book Romanticism and the Gothic, along with coedited volumes on Romantic drama and on Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, supports numerous essays published in ELH, PMLA, Studies in Romanticism, and elsewhere. Marilyn Gaull is Research Professor in the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Her publications include the book English Romanticism: The Human Context. She is the founder of the Wordsworth Circle and editor of its comprehensive journal, and is a frequent lecturer in international academic venues. Chene Heady is Assistant Professor at Longwood University (Virginia) where he teaches British Literature. He has published

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essays on John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf. Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English and Coordinator of Women’s Studies at Marquette University. Her books include Gothic Feminism, Romantic Androgyny, Romanticism: Comparative Discourses, and a number of others. She currently serves as coeditor of European Romantic Review. Magdalena M. Ostas is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. She is currently completing a study on Romanticism, subjectivity, and interiority that will join her previous work on narrative theory. Larry H. Peer is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, and Executive Director of the International Conference on Romanticism. He has published books and essays on Manzoni, Goethe, Diderot, Fielding, Byron, and others, as well as on Romantic theory and the Romantic manifesto. Charles J. Rzepka is Professor of English at Boston University and author of the books The Self as Mind, Sacramental Commodities, and Detective Fiction. His numerous published essays include groundbreaking insights into the intersection of Romanticism, crime writing, and ontology.

Chapter 1

I n t roduc t ion: Rom a n t ic i z i ng t h e Obj ec t Larry H. Peer

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here are those who might regard the title of this book a contradiction. A fluffy view of Romanticism would deny any serious connection between dreamy discourse and an interest in the material objects of everyday experience. If there is any one notion at the heart of superficial musing about this movement, it is probably the idea that its discourse reflects no type of realism. If we could make a pilgrimage back to the time when Romantic norms and assumptions dominated Western culture, we might be most interested to learn how readers heard Romantic poetry, and what went on in their heads as Romanticism spoke itself out. And we would find that there is a “hard” quality to image and rhetoric, manifest all over Europe in its numerous languages, that could surprise us. Some scholarship has angled toward this before. As early as Heinrich Bosse’s essay (“The Marvellous and Romantic Semiotics”) it was established that Romanticism represents a particular function of the interpretant in literary discourse and experience. Romantic theories of signification and symbol usage, as they were elaborated especially by Diderot, Lessing, Herder, Kant, Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, and Schleiermacher, insist upon the correlative, rather than oppositional, relationship of the marvelous and the realistic. Thus, Romantic “allusiveness” as a semiotic strategy is significantly more complex and linked to the “real” world (Chandler) than some (Bloom) would have us believe. Even if the pervasive issue in Romantic discourse is

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the will (Cooke), there is always a close, even symbiotic, relationship between “will,” “self,” and the material world in Romanticism, seen clearly, for example, in Mazzini’s music, the message of which is “I step forward”—the self exerting its will in a negotiation between the self and the real world. It seems clear that the Romantics were engaged in a high level of verbal aggression against a set of redundant propositions that had been culturally transmitted and validated, an aggression found in the use of the object in Romantic discourse. In fact, there is a peculiar paradox in Romanticism’s quest and nostalgia for the object (de Man). If we carefully observe the nature of the Romantic image, through numerous languages and across several disciplines, we find again and again that language strives to become nature through an aesthetic manipulation of the object. Romanticism is the first movement in Western culture to question the ontological primacy of the sensible object. In Hans Eichner’s survey of the history of the word “Romantic” (“Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word) we are shown that, to some extent, the name itself of the aesthetic program is deeply connected to a preoccupation with the intention to articulate full human selfcommand and self-expression (Eldridge) in its use of object-symbols (Foakes). Romanticism as the breakthrough of the “vegetative strata of the soul” (Grimme), the preconscious raising the imagination to consciousness, is seen in its view of and manipulation of objects in the real world. Even when Romanticism is “dissolution,” when it is subjectivity extricating itself from external objectivity in order to exist within the element of its own being, as posited by Hegel, there is yet a striving for interior objectivity (Hofstadter). As Romanticism accomplishes the rebirth of the spirit from the ashes of externality, its discourse centers on images that can exist beyond the possibility of dissociation in a condition of perfect unity and vitality (Kermode); so that image-making from the objects of real experience is a key to Romantic discourse. In Goethe’s case, for example, with Faust rejecting encyclopedic knowledge in favor of a grasp of the natural world’s secret forces, the harmony of her whole is found in Romantic modes of understanding the world of objects (Cunningham/Jardine), a Romantic thrust that would play a major role in establishing even natural science in the modern disciplinary sense. And even the evidence of Romantic writers’ marginalia, not only in books of natural history but also in poetry and record-keeping, shows the use of the objects of discourse (books) as objects for discourse (writing in them) (Jackson).

Introduction

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The Romantic claim for the aesthetic use of objects is the most extreme in literary history. The particularities of this practice originate in the 1790s in German-speaking Europe, represented best by Novalis’s 1799 assertion that the world must be Romanticized so that its original meaning may be discovered. Artists, the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley put it, are able to Romanticize the world by giving the commonplace a lofty meaning, to the ordinary an occult aspect, to the well known the dignity of the unknown. The arts, and particularly literature, serve the implicit mission of representing original, primordial meaning in original, radically individuated ways. This point of view gained pan-European acceptance primarily through the writings and lectures of first, August Wilhelm Schlegel (especially in his lectures of 1798 [Jena] and 1804 [Berlin]) and then, through the writings, lectures, and reputation of Hegel. Romanticism’s sense of using everything to Romanticize the world is connected in interesting ways with sociological/political/ economic/scientific factors. Lamarck’s theory of biological evolution, Carus’s invention of the discipline of comparative anatomy, Galvani’s experiments with electricity, Gauss’s mind-bending mathematical innovations, Reil’s theory of mind, Kielmeyer’s notion of organic forces, and so on, are other ground-breaking, although not necessarily aesthetic, approaches to getting at original meaning. And key to these developments, of course, is the assertion, originally formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that individuality and creative imagination are more important in every human sphere than empiricist and rationalist traditions of rules and conventions. The multiplicity of individualities and creative imaginations in the world reveal to an individual artist’s mind the uniqueness of his or her own distinct being and in turn lead to an explosion of interest in other languages and cultures and, by extension, to a deep curiosity about the intersection of modes and forms of human society and to a curiosity about human behavior, especially irrational and grotesque behavior. Thus, a literary work signifies a writer’s radically individuated creativity and implicates historical circumstances as well as linguistic polysystems. As Hegel argued, the individual creative act is colored by historically shifting factors of various kinds, but the creative genius, with her or his combinatory powers of imagination, is responsible for the singularity of a work. This imprinting of the semantic gesture promotes the artist as the central factor in creating aesthetic artifacts. These key facets of the Romantic gesture, the Romanticizing of the world, stem from a radically new paradigm of language itself.

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This new paradigm was first formulated by August Ferdinand Bernhardi in 1801. Arguing for the special status of literary discourse, he maintains that all speech acts, in their dialogical origins, are essentially poetic, and that literary expression is thus the primal articulation of humanness. At almost the same time, Schelling, with the exclusive use of the term Darstellung, asserts that creative language does not imitate the world and its objects, but instead presents them transcendentally, almost to say uncovers inventively, the “true,” that is, the “original” meaning of what is inside and outside the human self. And it is the emotional self, heretofore aesthetically neglected, that first interests Bernhardi and other early Romantic thinkers. Implicit in early Romantic cogitations about this matter is the question of what aesthetic form feeling can possibly take; in other words, poets face the problem of how emotion can be aesthetically conceptualized. The discursive practices of rational thinking and the rational application of symbolic language do not hold emotional expansiveness; so a radical new paradigm must be formulated, a paradigm requiring the use of symbolic language figuring forth the complex life of feeling. The Romantics saw that while it is true that a literary work represents something through the symbolic use of language, such representation is only expressive of ideas, not feelings. What is needed is a use of symbolic language that “forces” “the actual felt process of life, the tensions interwoven and shifting from moment to moment, the flowing and slowing, the drive and directedness of desires, and above all the rhythmic continuity of . . . selfhood” (Langer 133). This new use of symbolic objects and discourse is applied quickly all over Europe (Kermode 7 ff.), for example by Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound (all the energy of this poem derives from the use of objects Romanticized into self-projective feelings, as we move through the avalanche, volcanoes, caves, and the like) (Frye 111), and in Blake’s illustrations and comments on Dante (Gnappi 55 ff.). There is the need to express the turbulence, even chaos, of symbolic vortices moving unpredictably with the motion of human feeling and even of the cosmos itself (Minahen ix). And this Romantic use of objects has a heritage, particularly as Romantic emotive expression changes, in the modern world, into a quest for aesthetic experimentation (Moscovici 73 ff.). Of course, there is always the possibility that the ability of aesthetic language to do what the Romantics wanted it to do has to be distrusted (Steiner 122 ff.) by making it bear a weight it cannot possibly handle (Saussure 101 ff). But the Romantics did not merely wish to use language to express the world but also to create it (Picon 158), even if it is a world of full-fledged madness (Massey 27–28).

Introduction

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The Romantics found in Vico the theory that, at its origin and most original, language is always figurative, always apt to use objects symbolically in order to express the core properties of the mind. Vico, and then Herder, saw a way to use language aesthetically to manifest and cause the recipient of the speech act to conceptualize an idea— such a speech act being the first step toward Romanticism’s attempt to use language aesthetically to express and cause the recipient of the act also to empathize with an emotion, especially in coming to terms with the literary artifact’s creation of a new and self-projective world. And in the process of Romanticizing the object, the Romantics created a new theory of the mind (Richards 252–88). The point is that in Romanticism we find a fundamental proposition that aesthetic language by definition symbolizes the infinite, uses object-symbols to show how inner and outer reality is focused through the flexing lens of language, as Hegel argued (MuellerVollmer 172–73). This volume offers a number of new insights into the use of object symbolism in Romantic works, particularly as regards both author autonomy and strategy as well as the history and legacy of the movement. Marilyn Gaull examines two phrases from Wordsworth, “things forever speaking” and “objects of all thought,” variations of which appear throughout his verse. To Wordsworth these phrases were antonyms, contractions, opposites, and represent massive cultural, philosophical, sociological, and economic changes in Europe during his lifetime. Since this Romantic beginning, we have been “thing-ing” in Western culture: taking a word, concept, or object out of its natural setting and projecting human values, meanings, or explanations on it. Jocelyn-Almeida-Beveridge shows how actual letters served as Romanticized objects in the case of Francisco de Miranda, who corresponded with William Pitt about England helping South America cast off the oppression of the Spanish and Portuguese. The publication of this correspondence is evidence of how Miranda kept an eye on his public reception in England and became, even in his own time, the objects of his reputation. Today his letters are objects of negotiation between the Old World and the New, between a movement from eighteenth-century presuppositions and Romantic notions of national freedom and identity. Lisbeth Chapin deals with Percy Shelley’s custody trial following the suicide of his wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley. His letters during the trial show a turn toward his ethics of victimhood, where children must resist the very patriarchal author against which Shelley himself is pitted. Not only are the letters Romantic objects, but the child itself

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becomes the chief object of tragic innocence amidst the moral debris of an old order. In a discussion of Charlotte Smith’s Romantic kind of fable, Mark Fulk argues that we are able to understand her turn to this form as a way of dealing with and ultimately containing the epistemic collapse recorded in Beachy Head. British women writers have traditionally been marginalized in discussions of Romantic indeterminacy, even though a few critics have opened avenues for further exploration. Smith’s fables, as “object lessons,” mediate the epistemic and moral conflicts in ways transcending previous phallocentric paradigms. Rodney Farnsworth notes that in Jane Austin’s works perhaps no more interesting and telling bifurcation is exemplified than that between Elizabeth Bennett, the outspoken champion of personal independence from collectivity, and Fanny Price, the more pliable embodiment of Austenian individualism. Although it is a commonplace to see each character as a version of self-validating personal ethics, it is also common to see each as just a version of the other. But Fanny’s unmediated connection to Providence, conceived of in the more radical forms of Protestantism, and symbolized by objects such as The Book of Common Prayer, is more clearly linked to Romantic radical individualism than perhaps any other of Jane Austen’s characters. Diane Long Hoeveler, by demonstrating the centrality of the portrait of the ghostly Jeffrey Aspern in the novella The Aspern Papers, shows how objects of desire can migrate from Romanticism to a post-Romantic world, in this case the object of desire being a masculine creativity—a poet in love with art and beauty. The afterlives of Byron, Shelley, and Clare Clairmont, to a great extent are molded by this most interesting case of literary mirage in the aftermath of Romanticism. Michael Gamer finds that, taken as a whole, the writings of The Liberal founders and contributors provide an iconographic example of many English Romantic authors’ communal tendencies, their urge to form themselves into coteries. A key communal goal of this group became the creation of a Shelley myth after his drowning. The created myth as intellectual and cultural “object” is here accomplished by the manipulation of poetic remains. How those remains differ from an authorized collection of writings by a living author tells much about how a central event in mythmaking, in this case Shelley’s cremation, can be manipulated to the everlasting glory of a poet. In the case of Keats, as Magdalena Ostas argues, lines of influence between the poet and the visual arts highlight a kind of object aesthetics in the poetry itself. The case can be made that the genius of Keats’s poetry is its sensuousness, achieved by his technique of slowing down narrative

Introduction

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progression, thus giving the impression that the poetic persona has halted amid surrendered progression, thus having surrendered entirely to the moment and to the scene or object before it. Keats’s images, typically grounded in the material, external characteristics of their forms are closely related to visual representations, and show a continuing struggle to operate as forms of the materiality of Romantic language. Chene Heady argues that Keble’s The Christian Year, the best-selling book of poetry in Romantic England, essentially reconfigured early English-language Romanticism in terms of orthodox Anglicanism, and served as the object of reference for Romantic ideas of time and nature. Romanticism and the aesthetic use of objects in new ways shows itself in transnational ways as well. For example, William S. Davis explores the parallel between Novalis’s mysterious Singer and Shelley’s Alastor, in particular the function of each as a site for the fulfillment of Romanticism’s dream of overcoming distance, alienation, misunderstanding, and loss of form. Both paradoxically employ Otherness as a vehicle for sameness. Each work objectifies the “journey eastward,” the typical Romantic pilgrimage. Charles J. Rzepka brings many of the implications of this collection of essays into focus as he insists that in Romanticism studies we need some kind of vaccine for factual error and misunderstood, under-calculated language use. At least we need to quarantine these tendencies by restraining our enthusiasm for being “right” about texts and by weighing the facts of Romanticism again. A reexamination, retallying, remeasuring, redescribing, and so on, would help us refer to the facts and objects of Romanticism in terms more easily validated across the face of Europe. Taken together, these essays neither prove nor disprove larger claims about Romanticism and its aesthetic use of objects. Nor do they promise to provide a categorical explanation of precisely why Romantics were fascinated by the object. Rather, this book argues that Romanticism’s use of the object is neither rhetorically nor ideologically mystifying, and that the relationship between the radical individuality of Romantic discourse and the sign system of natural objects is not incommensurable.

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Chapter 2

“Th i ngs For e v e r Spe a k i ng” a n d “Obj e c t s of A l l Though t ” Marilyn Gaull

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hings for ever speaking” and “Objects of all thought”: the phrases are from Wordsworth, the first from “Expostulation and Reply,” the second from “Tintern Abbey,” but variations of them appear throughout his verse. To contemporary readers, they seem interchangeable in the vernacular, although not always: such as when I tell you to pack up your “things” but not to pack up your “objects,” or if I affectionately say that you are a “sweet thing” but not, at least to your face, a “sweet object.” To Wordsworth, they were antonyms, contradictions, opposites. And, technically, they are still: the changes in meaning originate in massive cultural, philosophical, sociological, and economic changes during his lifetime. In serious intellectual discourse, every major thinker—Marx, Darwin, Fraser, Freud, John Stuart Mill, even Kierkegaard, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and Foucault—defined them, in cases other than the vernacular, as different, not even opposites, as different as “Thing theory” and “Object theory”: “Thing theory,” an aesthetic growing out of anthropology, and “Object theory,” a psychological concept explaining family dynamics and human emotional development. Thing-ing is what we are doing in this book, taking a word, concept, object, even person out of its natural or material setting and projecting human values, meanings, or explanations on it. The word and concept “Thing” that Wordsworth inherited and used with such subtlety and variety originated in ancient Scandinavian

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language and practices as part of the linguistic heritage of the north country. It survived in the oral tradition as a “generic” word, a word that acquires new meanings through usage and history without losing the old ones; a cumulative word, or, like the living things it often represents, organic and evolutionary. “Object,” as Wordsworth and his contemporaries used the word, refers to a class of things that are made, manufactured, acquired, or inanimate; something static, or a commodity, a property, or a form known by its structure or place rather than by its behavior or function. The word “object” originates in Latin and, unlike the word “thing,” survived and was transmitted in the written tradition through Old French to English in the thirteenth century. The word “object” referred to an obstacle or to the recipient of an action such as the object of a verb, the not-me, as opposed to the subject. Or, used as a verb, to object means to resist or contradict—in terms of history and usage then “object” had no relation to “thing” and in Wordsworth’s lifetime would not have been confused. While Things are often living, as Wordsworth said, Objects usually are not, although metaphorically they become things when they enter a human relationship, which they, like everything else, began to do in the post-Kantian world of Romanticism. Wordsworth described these exchanges, the mind “half-creating” and “half-perceiving,” and Coleridge their failure, “we receive but what we give,” so accurately that it took 200 years of scientific thinking for cognitive scientists to actually study and explain them. For example, in the introduction to The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz describes human beings as animals who are “suspended in webs of significance [they themselves have] spun” (5), his definition of culture, the web/object, turning into a thing as metaphor. Endowing objects with human value, significance, is brilliantly explored in Judith Pascoe’s The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collections. She raises an even more challenging issue in “Collect Me Nots,” her Op Ed piece for the New York Times from May 17, 2007, in which she conveys how body parts such as Napoleon’s penis become relics; how things become objects when they are owned. In the anatomized, fragmented, synecdochic world of Romanticism, Wordsworth, for example, can talk about “the Mighty World of Eye and Ear,” or Keats about “this living hand”; lovers cut and exchange locks of hair and write poems about them, and hearts such as Shelley’s, as Pascoe notes, are saved in desk drawers until they turn to dust. Like the Elgin Marbles, then, when body parts are detached from their living owners they are things

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turned into objects. As artifacts and possessions they take on the character of the person who owns them, rather than the person from whom they are detached. They become social objective correlatives, for example, or the reverse: people become expressions of the objects they accumulate, a displacement to which Marxists objected, on which Freud built a career; think of status symbols such as annotated books, trophies and trophy wives, and clothes with logos on them. If perceptions turn objects into things, then memory—the other sacred faculty of Romanticism—in a mysterious reciprocity, turns things into objects, collectables, valued for their history with people, or other objects, or where they were found or purchased. Take, for example, Lamb’s Old China. In another example of how literature anticipates social thought, Mark Kwint in the introduction to Material Memories (1999), says, “[H]uman memory has undergone a mutual evolution with the objects that inform it . . . the relationship between them is dialectical . . . the material environment influences the structure and content of the human mind” and the “environment” is “shaped along the lines of what persists in the mind’s eye.” Wordsworth knew that, and so did Blake, Shelley, and Coleridge. All human beings, according to Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (2001), are engaged in such a reciprocal relationship with natural things, usually unacknowledged: potatoes, for example, tulips, and apples, marijuana, even viruses reproduce and thrive because of a subtle mechanism that makes human beings want to grow them. Like the potatoes and tulips, objects and artifacts also find ways to survive by making humans salvage them, as Chris Gosden illustrated in “What Do Objects Want,” published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Focusing on his case study on the period between 150 BC and 200 AD, when Britain was incorporated into the Roman Empire, he interpreted how the pots and ornaments, the symbolic and practical objects, reflected and shaped the people who used them, their usefulness enhanced as their meaning changed with the culture. Wordsworth’s objects look like things, and may have been things; they become objects because of the way memory functions: his butterfly, a living thing, becomes in his poem, the historian of infancy, an object, an external memory chip, an exogram such as souvenirs, memorials, photos, a seashell, a wedding ring. Lucy, in the poem and maybe in death as well, rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks, and stones, and trees, turns from “a thing that could not feel” into an object. Similarly, many of Wordsworth’s stones, trees, flowers, are just objects: the stones in “Michael,” the meanest flower, the

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broken wooden bowl, the yew tree, the rainbow, all are memory chips that set off strains of thought and poetry but themselves remain inert, dispossessed, existing whether one perceives or uses them or not. However, such stubborn objecthood is unusual in the art of the period. In the over-reaching subjectivism of post-Romantic art, objects turn into things at a phenomenal rate: human beings possessing their material environment, internalizing, animating, personalizing, naming, investing objects with history, a social life as Brown called it. Until, as Bruno Latour observed in “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” so many objects have become things, or “objects mistaken for things,” that in fear of running out of objects we obsess about collecting and preserving anything that can serve as an object—ruins, bones, old bottles, whatever. Fortunately, there is no danger of running out of objects: aside from the art and literature or even the creative imagination of Romanticism, the world was and still is filling up with objects. Beside the objects that were manufactured, purchased, and collected during the great age of collecting, from early in the eighteenth century, creative and skillful individuals in all fields were generating instruments and with them, or before them, the concept of instrumentality. Instruments are objects (not tools) that displace human action, that mediate between the creator and the creation, removing the labor several times from the laborer, from human touch; the object is depersonalized, as Marx said, in the anonymous world of the marketplace and commercial exchange. For example, a book of poetry is an object between two thinghoods, the author and the reader; it is a mere statistical book of poetry, the object that emerges whenever people use that bizarre and redundant phrase “print culture.” The steam engine, spinning jenny, and printing press are obvious displacements of human agency: before their invention, people walked, pushed, carried, wove, and wrote longhand or set type. Shortly after the piano was invented in 1709, someone invented a tuning fork to replace the human ear in assessing its performance; a mercury thermometer invented in 1724 measured the temperature more accurately than human touch; bifocals for failing eyes, a self-winding clock, bicycles, a guillotine to distance the act of beheading from the executioner, a typewriter in the nineteenth century, sewing machines, staplers, safety pins, even a baton to replace the hand in conducting an orchestra made up of other instruments, objects producing artificial music. Could one say, then, that the artistic, emotional, and psychological process of turning objects into things was balanced by, responded to, defended against, the proliferation of instruments that

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replenished the world of objects with items, tools, and products that could not become things? One could, I suppose, say anything, especially if attracted to the symmetry of it—but I doubt if it is more than a coincidence. Then as now, there are distinctions between objects and things, the refinements, the historical details that matter. In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth carefully distinguishes between things and objects: the “motion” and “spirit” “impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought / And rolls through all things” (100–103), including himself as thing, part of the living world of things. While he included objects in his world, he was a poet of things, the speaking faces of things, both natural and human, things such as waters, wind, trees, a blind beggar, the pansy at his feet that repeats the same tale, things that sing, speak, roar, signify, admonish, provoke, remind. On the other hand, Wordsworth’s objects do not speak. They require speakers, such as Keats, the master-ventriloquists, though not the “divine ventriloquists” that Coleridge considered poets to be. Keats is a poet of objects, deeply invested in the empirical, the properties, the object-ness: the clothes, food, climate, and sensuality of “Eve of St. Agnes,” the textures of “Ode to Psyche,” the palpable “Ode to Autumn,” or the obdurate materiality of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” While Wordsworth’s things are anthropomorphic, Keats’s objects are personified, each endowed with speech, an awakening and unanswerable question or an aphoristic wisdom invoking the music of the season or the beauty of the object. While Wordsworth’s things speak to him, communicate, Keats’s objects are gnomic and self-referential. These distinctions and more between Keats’s objects and Wordsworth’s things reveal the tradition each worked out of and to which they are closely allied: Wordsworth’s debts were to the oral tradition in which the concept and word “thing” survived, and Keats, a deeply textual poet, was shaped by the written. In Great Britain, the oral tradition, the language of conversation, Wordsworth’s language of things, is mostly Nordic in origin, descended from fertility myths, sustained by generations of pastoral and agrarian cultures where language describes birth, death, renewal, the cycles of life, the living things—a language confined to northern valleys and traditional lives. Keats’s poetry begins in reading Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, in the iconic vision from “Sleep and Poetry,” of his falling asleep surrounded by books in Leigh Hunt’s study and dreaming a literary dream—as he did in Hyperion, a dream of objects—that he awakes to find real. On the other

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hand, Wordsworth’s Arab’s dream sequence in The Prelude is of an impending natural doom, a world of speaking things. This juxtaposition reveals the historical antinomy between objects and things, words conflated even at conferences devoted to distinguishing between them. But, as a Romanticist, one has special access to the historical moment, however long it lasted, when the two traditions—the oral and written, the world of things and of objects— collide and transform each other: when they are published, like any other product, things turning into objects, with no inherent purpose no matter how high the claims poets and critics make for their social and spiritual value And objects turn into things, extending the possibility of human performance (automata, pantomime, the monster in Frankenstein, later robots, movies, telephones, and so on). Tom Mitchell said, “[T]he slogan for our times is . . . not things fall apart, but things come alive,” in his “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” first delivered at Mark Lussier’s 2000 NASSR conference on Romantic Physicality and which, along with Lussier’s book, Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Palgrave, 2000), initiated this long conversation we are joining now, a conversation wonderfully represented in Mark Blackwell’s collection, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (2007) and John Plotz’s “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory.” In this process, this intersection— one might even say metamorphosis—Wordsworth, as much a man of print as of speech, was pivotal, a mediator in disseminating an oral culture and converting it to a written culture, yoking the great Norse tradition with the classical, translating a world of things into a world of objects, books, and transforming a world of objects, the rocks, stones, ruined cottages, and beggars, into things. If you feel as I do that “things” seem to be better than “objects,” that women have a right to be offended if they are treated as objects while they are called old things, or sweet things, or hot things, that children correctly insist on naming objects to make them things, that primitive religions endow objects with spirits to term them into sacred things, and that objects, as a result, are having a hard time of it, then you can understand why some artists, sympathetic to the marginal, defending the excluded, standing up for minorities, devised an exhibit called “The Happiness of Objects,” inspired, according to the catalogue, by Tom Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Mitchell and the artists in the exhibits emphasized one answer: some objects do not want anything—they are autonomous, self-sufficient, beyond desire, complete and happy without us,

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in the context of other objects. From the catalogue it follows that “[t] he Happiness of Objects will attempt to capture what objects want from other objects, from the context of their display to potential response to their presence.” From April 29 to July 29, 2007, the exhibit was on view at the Sculpture Center in Queens, New York City. Beside some visual illusions, the major attraction at the exhibit was a piece called “Flatland,” four stories high, all connected by ladders and chutes, about twelvefeet long, and only two-feet wide, a great transparent wall, within which six artists dressed in colored overalls lived as if it were an ant colony, on display, viewable on their web site, sleeping, eating, talking on the phone, doing yoga, writing on a laptop, climbing up and down ladders; in brief, a narrative of humans as objects. In relation to a Romantic Object (the “Grecian Urn” for example), it seems the very opposite, and raises questions about the sufficiency of language to describe it. But, the object, Flatland, like the Urn, defies the webs of meaning the human imagination would like to enmesh it in. Like the leaf-fringed legend haunting about its shape, the procession leading to the sacrifice, neither dead nor alive, the creatures in Flatland are suspended, puzzling, timeless, a procession, a sacrifice, bounded only by a shape, a frame. You may recall that the Ode ends badly, with either the Urn or poet, voicing either a platitude or riddle, a challenge, an admonition, or a promise—who knows—that truth is beauty, beauty truth. After many years of teaching and hearing people explain the poem, especially the conclusion, and still both baffled and enchanted by it, I would like to add one more interpretation— for which I credit Flatland: “You hang around, ask too many questions and imply that you want more, too much. You want an answer? Here’s an answer . . . Now get out of my face.” That is the voice of the Urn extended into contemporary objecthood. As Mitchell and others said, sometimes objects do not want anything, or nothing that humans can offer. The catalogue of the exhibit responds with “The Object Bill of Rights,” “a non-exhaustive and disputable list,” the author writes, which “will serve as . . . a working document to be completed and informed by participating artists.” The Object’s Bill of Rights The Object has the right to many lovers The Object has the right to fuse with other objects The Object has the right to acknowledge its history of production The Object has the right to be classified The Object has the right to be out of order

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M a r ily n G au l l The Object has the right to refuse obsolescence The Object has the right to be dysfunctional The Object has the right to refuse or accept manipulation The Object has the right to define the terms of its reproduction The Object has the right to define the terms of its exchange with other objects The Object has the right to define the terms of its exchange with the environment The Object has the right to be gendered, non-gendered or hybrid The Object has the right to be claimed or forgotten, lost or found The Object has the right to escape authorship The Object has the right to get or not to get with the program The Object has the right to stand its own ground The Object has the right to be recognized. The Object has the right to remain unidentifiable The Object has the right to be silent The Object has the right to create its own language The Object has the right to a new identity The Object has the right to free speech The Object has the right to be sedentary or traveling The Object has the right to pose as another object The Object has the right to choose the company it keeps The Object has the right to be cherished and examined The Object has the right to be absent The Object has the right to be a subject Sign or design? That is the question of the object.

Chapter 3

“P e r f ec t ly C om pat i bl e Obj ec t s”: M r . P i t t C on t e m pl at e s Br i ta i n a n d S ou t h A m e r ic a Jocelyn M. A lmeida

“What may be the consequence to Spain of an hostile armament

appearing off Mexico and Peru time only can discover; but there is every reason to suppose, from the present insurgent state of these Spanish settlements, that it would require but little address in a British Commander to excite a revolt” (“What” 3). The Times’ risky speculation in May 1790 adumbrates the beginning of British involvement with the “insurgent Spanish settlements” in the Romantic period. Earlier that year, Francisco de Miranda, known as “el Precursor” because he promoted the independence of Latin America long before Simón Bolívar appeared on the scene, had proposed to William Pitt that “England would assist [South America] to shake off the infamous oppression in which Spain keeps her” (“Proposal” 15: 111), and in exchange, England would obtain “the commercial intercourse to be formed between the English and natives upon the Grand Coasts of South America” (“Note” 15: 128). Miranda offered the vista of new markets in exchange for military assistance, no small incentive given the shift underway in the Atlantic economic system in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.1 Adam Smith, whom Miranda read, called attention to South America’s potential in The Wealth of Nations. “The greater part too of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies are altogether new markets. New Granada, the Yucatan,

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Paraguay, and the Brazils were, before discovered by the Europeans, inhabited by savage nations, who had neither arts nor agriculture. A considerable degree of both has now been introduced into all of them” (203).2 Miranda recreated the New World for Pitt through the appeal of “new markets”; their initial rapprochement in the early 1790s was resumed in 1798 after Miranda’s participation as a general in the French Revolution from 1792 to 1797—a formidable hiatus that made him all the more alluring to British observers after he survived imprisonment and Robespierre’s Terror, and published two major texts from his experiences: Original Correspondence between Generals Dumourier, Miranda, Pache, and Beurnonville, Ministers of War since 1793 (1794) and Opinion du General Miranda sur La Situation Actuelle de la France (1795). In light of the French Revolution and its tropicalized twin in St. Domingue, and Napoleon’s rise later in the decade, the emancipation of South America in exchange for free markets with England was a project that in Miranda’s view rendered “the liberty and well-being of Hispanoamericans and the honor and aims of Britain two perfectly compatible objects” (“Don Francisco” 15: 142). The early 1790s were particularly auspicious to begin making this case. Sir Joseph Banks held forth on the discovery of new iron mines, the Edinburgh Review reported on the silver mines of Potosi, and the possibilities of “Coutchouc,” or rubber, for manufacturing everyday objects with assistance of “the Savages of America” tantalized British readers (Anderson 107).3 A world of rubber boots, gloves, caps, umbrellas, tents, elastic springs, and catheters captivated the imagination in more ways than one. “The little bottles [of rubber], when applied to the breasts of women distressed with sore nipples, can be so managed, as to occasion a more gentle suction than can be effected any other way” (Anderson 106). South America offered the British public everything from metals to rubber, and, if these objects captured the fancy because of their potential for profit, Miranda presented Pitt with an even bigger one: a leading role for Britain in the reconfiguration of power in the Atlantic. Through his negotiations with Pitt, Miranda initiated a narrative that conjoined national liberation with British capital and military support against Spain and France.4 The imaginative investments in the Americas of writers such as Helen Maria Williams, Robert Southey, José Blanco White, and John Keats have been explored in the seminal essays of Alan Richardson, Nanora Sweet, and Charles Rzepka, while Diego Saglia’s Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia and

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other recent publications continue to expand our understanding of Romanticism’s Anglo-Hispanic orientation.5 This essay contributes to that effort by tracing the negotiations of Francisco de Miranda with William Pitt through their two cycles. Miranda’s role has long been eclipsed on the one hand by Bolívar’s more Napoleonic persona, and the default association made between Latin America and Alexander Von Humboldt. Yet Miranda remains a crucial figure—if not the most crucial—in the creation of Latin America as an object for the British. Despite his critical role in promoting British involvement in the independence of Latin America and his resurgence among historians, he has been all but absent in recent accounts of Romanticism.6 Mary Louise Pratt, among the first scholars to recognize Latin America as a locus for Romantic-era writers, focuses mostly on Humboldt, with exceptions for criollos Andrés Bello and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Miranda predated these criollos and Bolívar by over twenty years, and left an archive of twenty-four volumes containing letters, pamphlets, articles, and journals that is a formidable source of texts in its own right. Miranda’s collaborations with James Mill in The Edinburgh Review are perhaps the most literary of his endeavors; his other writings fall within the purview of what Diego Saglia calls the discourses of the “Romantic nation” (65).7 Yet Miranda formulates an idea of national sovereignty that is based on alliances rather than a self-contained “imagined community” (Anderson 63). In this sense, he anticipates a more radical sovereignty, one that “does not annex or destroy the other powers it faces, but on the contrary opens itself to them, including them in the network” (Hardt and Negri 166). Miranda’s concept of sovereignty positioned Britain in a leading role among alliances with other powers that were conceived in mainly economic terms. Miranda thus laid the groundwork for Bolívar’s own dealings with the British years later, and the “capitalist vanguard” that followed Humboldt. His negotiations with Pitt adumbrate “the revolutionary emergence and subsequent consolidation of capitalism in the British empire” (13), which Lance Newman posits as central within the larger context of transatlantic Romanticism. Miranda’s multinational wanderings “created a network that spanned the Atlantic world” as Karen Racine shows in her recent and acclaimed biography (xix). Within this network, however, Miranda worked behind the scenes to reorient the British gaze toward South America after its loss of the United States in 1776. Such a reorientation was culturally underway beginning with William Robertson’s immensely popular History of America (1777). Leask observes furthermore that “in the 1790s, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis and Richard

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Brinsley Sheridan both adapted Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru, with its strongly anti-imperialist message, for the British stage” (“Southey’s” 140); Saglia notes that it was Sheridan’s “greatest success” (43).8 Southey’s Madoc, with its several iterations in 1794, 1797–98, and 1805, attests to the growing interest in South America in the 1790s, one that Humboldt reinvigorated later in the 1800s and into the 1820s.9 Moreover, Miranda’s project of liberation harmonized with those in sites such as Sierra Leone and New South Wales, which after the U.S War of Independence in 1776 became “heterotopias of compensation” (Foucault qtd. in Coleman 2). Deirdre Coleman illustrates how Sierra Leone was understood as “rectifying the wrongs done to these oppressed people [slaves]” and New South Wales was “a place of utopian fantasy about new colonial beginnings in a great southern land mass” (117, 142). Liberation and utopia, ideologies that drove Romantic colonization, fed British ideations of intervention in South America and led to scenarios of restitution. “The standard of freedom, which was unfurled in the frozen regions of the north, may be elevated on the burning plains of Mexico and Peru. [ . . . ] Another Montezuma may ascend the Mexican throne, and the offspring of the Incas re-assume the scepter which their ancestors swayed” declared the Literary Magazine and British Review (“On the Independence” 125). Miranda reached London after a series of travels, first through the newly independent United States (1783–84), and afterward a grand tour (1785–98) that included stops in Holland, Prussia, Italy, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Russia; he did the first half in the company of Colonel W. S. Smith, John Adams’s son-in-law. In the United States he met patriots such as Smith and Adams, Henry Knox, and Alexander Hamilton, and British official Thomas Pownall, who had been governor of Massachusetts and North Carolina. Throughout both journeys, he talked about the project of liberating Spanish America to whomever would listen. In Russia, he famously incurred the favor of Catherine the Great.10 When Miranda arrived in London in 1789 after his sojourn in Russia, Pownall arranged an introduction to William Pitt, since he believed that “the general purport to be proposed as laying an enlarged Basis for the future power of Great Britain: as opening an almost inexhausitible [sic] source of Commerce: & as a measure which instead of involving expense, offers the fairest prospect of aid in paying a proportion of the National Debt” (“Conferencias” 15: 1083). The “enlargement” of British power and trade, however, was not to be equated with the earlier, imperial enterprise of the Spanish or the British. As a colonial official, Pownall had first-hand experience of American discontent. He emphasized that

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“[i]t would be necessary to Manifest to the World that our operations had neither conquest, nor commercial monopoly as the object” (“Conferencias” 15: 109). Rather, a narrative of liberation that drew from the discourses of enslavement and abolition began to justify British intervention. “Many active leading enterprising [individuals] wish to see this country of South America emancipated from slavery and established on equal ground with the rest of the governments of the world” (Pownall, “Conferencias” 15: 109). Miranda seized on the discourse of enslavement that his fellow creoles had adopted metaphorically and which the French had appropriated to galvanize revolution, as Srinivas Aravamudan has argued (298).11 Demanding redress against the oppressive policies of the Spanish minister in Caracas, a group of creoles wrote to Miranda that the minister “sigue tratando a todos los americanos como si fuesen unos esclavos viles” [continues to treat all Americans as if they were vile slaves] and they were treated “peor que muchos negros esclavos de quienes sus amos hacen mayor confianza” [worse than many black slaves who are entrusted more by their masters] (Viste 15: 68). The alliance between France and Spain, according to Miranda, “sancionó nuestra esclavitud perpetua constituyéndonos en la clase de los ilotas del genero humano” [sanctioned our (South America’s) perpetual slavery turning us into the Helots of the human race] (“A Don” 15: 382–83).12 The British, for their part, warmed up to the idea of “emancipating” the metaphoric slaves of another imperial power. Pownall indicated that South America “must wait for its deliverance, and depend for any new-establishment, as the deliverance and new establishment of the Children of Israel did on Moses, sent to lead them out of slavery” (“Pro-Memoria” 16: 75). As an object of empire, South America afforded the British an opportunity to reinvent the idea of imperium itself; liberation from an oppressive government could now justify the intervention of a foreign power. Miranda and Pownall proposed that the dividends of “inexhaustible” commerce could increase British power just as much, if not more, than establishing a full-fledged colony. By liberating South America, the British could “take possession of and hold command of the Pass of the Darien—in order to secure our Communications & the means of our supplies with our operations in the South Seas” (Pownall, “Conferencias” 15: 109) and thus ensure commercial and military routes of global dimensions. The first meeting between Miranda and Pitt took place in Hollwood, Pitt’s country estate, and began the first round of negotiations from January of 1790 to March of 1792. It is telling that

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after their first meeting, Miranda does not give impressions of Pitt but of his books. “Galeria des etates Generaux, Sorrows of Werter, Parliamentari register [sic], Euripides, Livi, Johnson [ . . . ] que no es mala mezcla [not a bad mix]” (“Hollwood” 15: 110). To an avid book reader and book collector like Miranda—his legendary library came to weigh three tons (White 16: 279) and eventually resided in his London apartment—Pitt’s books had as much to say about his interlocutor as any other object surrounding the prime minister. Moreover, Miranda highlights the centrality of books as objects in building a case for launching a war of independence against Spain. Within the context of the connection between literacy and the empowerment of Romanticism’s others—Olatidah Equiano’s Narrative and Toussaint Louverture’s identification with Raynal’s Spartacus come to mind— Miranda’s evaluation of the books reveal him as a participant of the Republic of Letters, a European construct that becomes an instrument of nation-building, as Benedict Anderson observes (61). Pitt’s selection undoubtedly included books condemned by the Inquisition, which had the “object of [prohibiting books and papers] that questioned the dogma of the Church, its rituals, and propagated opinions that perverted Christian morals.”13 In recognizing his own reading in Pitt’s books, Miranda takes a stance against Spanish power; he transforms reading into a political act as does Blanco White, who also rebels against the theocratic arm of the Spanish crown by reading forbidden works, and hides from his family to read a copy of Don Quijote, “considered a dangerous book by my father” (Life 1: 9). Shortly after the Hollwood meeting, Miranda wrote the Proposal of February 14, 1790 in which he “requests that England would assist [South America] to shake off the infamous oppression in which Spain keeps her” (“Proposal” 15: 111). Among the more outrageous Spanish policies Miranda cites preventing criollos from occupying any administrative and civil posts, limiting freedom of movement, since criollos could not travel without permission from the king, and, last but not least, “to oppress their minds by the infamous tribunal of the Inquisition, that forbids [Latin Americans] reading or having any useful books or publications that may be capable of illustrating human understanding; whom by those means they pretend to degrade, to make superstitious & despicable, merely by a gross Ignorance” (“Proposal” 15: 111). Miranda casts Britain in the role of military liberator and cultural tutor, and reiterates the most compelling reason for its intervention in Latin America. “South America has a very extensive trade to offer with preference to England; it amounts to near 10 Million £ the consumption only [sic]; has treasure to pay

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with punctuality the services which she may receive [ . . . ] & even to pay an essential part of the national Debt of England” (“Proposal” 15: 113). From the vantage point of history, the statement could be one of the most ironic uttered during the Romantic period. Subsequent events proved Miranda (and Pownall) overzealous in projecting that South America could either “pay with punctuality the services which she may receive” or “the national Debt of England.” Miranda, however, was fatally right about the advantages that a Latin American consumer base would present to Britain. Henry Brougham said to the House of Commons in his State of the Nation address in 1817: “There can be no field of enterprise so magnificent in promise, so well calculated to rise sanguine hopes, so congenial to the most generous sympathies, so consistent with the best and highest interest of England, as the vast continent of South America” (39). By 1824 “[t]he former Spanish colonies and Brazil were markets hungry for English textiles and pounds sterling and so much percent. [George] Canning did not err when he wrote ‘The deed is done, the nail is driven, Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English’ ” (qtd. in Galeano 285). The spread of British trade did not escape Charles Darwin, who would remark that a traveler could find “many shops kept by Englishmen & full of English goods” throughout South America (Darwin 115). Between the saturation of local markets with British goods and the loans that British banks extended, Latin American economies came to be controlled by British interests, an arrangement that has been referred to as “informal empire.” This almost quaint term diverts our attention from the emergence of a sophisticated economic model that globalization has made all too familiar, and which has to be factored into the revolutionizing of capitalist channels in the Atlantic during the Romantic period. This reconfiguration of the global economy included the project of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself, and the substitution of military and political controls by economic ones. Besides goods and loans, the British traded the currency of the newly independent Latin American states, a trade that had global repercussions, as noted in a British Consular Report: The greatest article of Import, however, has always been treasure [ . . . ] chiefly in the form of Coin,—the Dollars of the several independent states. . . . The imports from South America have almost always exceeded the exports, and it is a question of some difficulty to determine how the surplus was disposed of. There is no doubt, however, that the trade was maintained chiefly with British capital, and it followed, therefore,

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Capital invested in South America thus circulated around the globe, and fueled British global trade, contributing to a “surplus” in Great Britain. Besides the trade with Britain, free trade with South America meant trade between British colonial outposts and the new republics. New South Wales, for example, imported livestock, donkeys, mules, mares, and wheat from Valparaiso (Keeble 31–32); coffee went from Brazil into the South African Cape because it “became eligible for ‘colonial’ as opposed to ‘foreign’ rates of import duty in Great Britain, whither it was forwarded” (Keeble 66). lf “[a]nti-slavery was less about humanitarianism than about devising new forms of labour exploitation” (Davis qtd. in Coleman 28), political liberation went hand in hand with free trade. In a statement addressed to Latin Americans after meeting with Pitt, Miranda criticized the Spanish monopoly. “La España solo se acuerda de nosotros para imponernos tributos [ . . . ] para ahogar nuestra industria [ . . . ] para prohibir nuestro comercio . . . El gobierno español no quiere que seamos ricos, ni que nos comuniquemos con las demas naciones” [Spain only remembers us to impose taxes . . . to strangle our industry . . . to forbid our trade . . . the Spanish government does not want us to be rich or to communicate with other nations] (“Proclamas” 16: 105). Without the benefit of hindsight, Miranda envisioned free trade with Britain as part of Latin America’s command of its own resources and a chance to acquire wealth. A reader of Smith, Miranda put his faith in the invisible hand that somehow would make the market work in South America’s favor. To that end, he supplied Pitt with population estimates, list of products imported and exported, with a separate category for contraband merchandise; estimates of the number of soldiers and where they were stationed, taxes raised, number of ships and troops on horseback. Silver and gold lead the “Productos” list, followed by cochineal, indigo, cacao, sugar, leather, and tobacco. Besides the proposal and lists, Miranda also lists all the Jesuits exiled in Italy (after they had been expelled from Spanish colonies in 1767), maps of Havana, and a detailed account of Túpac Amaru’s uprising in Cuzco in 1781 (“Proposal” 15: 110–11). Miranda argued that the combination between political independence and “a plan of Commerce reciprocally advantageous” would result in “the most respectable & preponderant political Union in the World,” and

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that South Americans would become “worthy of being the intimate allies of the most enlightened and celebrated Power upon earth” (“Proposal” 15: 113). Miranda stresses the purchasing power of the population: “Y si se considera que todos 11 millones de habitantes todos se visten de manufactures Europeas; y beben los vinos y aguardientes de Europa—se verá que el cálculo no es exagerado” [And if one considers that all the 11 million inhabitants all dress from European manufactures, and drink the wines and spirits of Europe, it will be seen that the calculation is not exaggerated] (“Apuntes” 15: 123). If the offer for preferential trade to Britain was not enough, it could “explore the possibility of making . . . a Canal of navigation across the Isthmus of Panama that will facilitate the Commerce of China & the South Seas” (Pownall, “Conferencias” 15: 114). After Hollwood, Pitt and Miranda had at least two other meetings, one in May, and one around October of 1790. During the May meeting, Pitt introduced Miranda to Lord Grenville, and Miranda observed “me enseñó mis Proyectos que llevaba en una caja verde al Consejo privado—hablamos sobre el viaje de Pages [sic] &c . . . sobre la disposición del Pueblo en Caracas, y demás Provincias a unirse a las fuerzas inglesas para recobrar la independencia y libertad” [he showed me my projects, which he carried in a green box to the private council—we spoke about Pages’s voyage and about the disposition of the people in Caracas and other provinces to join English forces to recover their liberty and independence] (“Diario” 15: 120) Miranda and Pitt most likely discussed Thomas Gage’s A Survey of the Spanish West Indies, which Miranda had quoted in his “Proposal” (15: 117). Besides acknowledging Gage’s Survey as a common text, Pitt bound Miranda’s own “Proposal,” lists, and maps into a book of sorts by putting them in a “green box.” The physical collection of Miranda’s papers indicates that Pitt took his various documents seriously enough to gather the pieces into an object of its own. The camaraderie between Miranda and Pitt was even more evident in their subsequent meeting; when Miranda showed Pitt the geography of Peru and Chile pouring over “los mapas D’Anville,” Pitt “como buen escolar se ponía a gates para comprender el mapa tendido sobre el encarpetado del suelo” [like a good student got on all fours to study the map spread on the carpet] (“Diario” 15: 121). The almost boyish enthusiasm that Pitt displayed over the project led Miranda to fill Pitt’s requests for more maps and papers “without any delay” (“Diario” 15: 121). The possible war with Spain over Nootka Sound intensified Pitt’s interest in South America. Spain claimed sovereignty over the

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inlet off the coast of present-day Vancouver, and confiscated lands and property of British subjects who had established a trading post there. Miranda’s position, an ambiguous one since he was not representing any official government, was at best that of an intelligence consultant. To that end, he requested an allowance from the British Government, since he was essentially living on the credit that his friends at Turnbull & Forbes extended. According to Miranda, Pitt reassured him that “any sum of money I should want in the meantime you were ready to supply me” (“To William” 15: 134) but the money never arrived. From May 1790 to March 1792 Miranda continued to supply information to Pitt, even presenting “a plan of attack” (“To William” 15: 135); the British, however, did not go to war with Spain. The two countries agreed to a restitution of the property that the Spanish had seized and to not interfere “either in navigation or their fisheries in the Pacific, or in the South Seas” (“Proceedings” 38). They also agreed that the British could not start any “new settlements to the eastern and western coasts of South America [ . . . ] which are already occupied by Spain” as long as Spain respected British fishing and trading rights (“Proceedings” 39). Miranda was sorely disappointed in this outcome and communicated as much to Pitt in a letter that took a long view of their negotiations. “Not long after, the Convention with Spain arrived; and of course every progress in the intended operations was stopped.” (“To William” 15: 135). His sense of disappointment and frustration with Pitt is palpable in the enumeration of all the times that Pitt promised to meet after the maps were handed over “Not hearing from you three months after, I applied for an interview [ . . . ] you answered me by your secretary Mr Smith” (“To William” 15: 135). Pitt had requested Miranda’s “views” after the failure to go to war with Spain, and in response Miranda had reiterated his commitment to independence and “commercial advantages to great Britain” (“To William” 15: 135). After not answering Miranda for some months Pitt eventually granted him a meeting, in which Miranda told him about how Catherine the Great had offered her protection and a salary of “1000 Louis d’or per an”; according to Miranda, Pitt urged him to stay and that he “should not be disappointed any further” (“To William” 15: 136). The support Miranda had solicited from the government amounted to £1,000 a year, but he received £500, and a sharp reply from Pitt. “I certainly do not recollect having ever told you that you should receive £1000 nor have I understood from Mr. Smith [Pitt’s secretary] that you stated any such Expectation when the sum of £500 was paid to you” (“To Francisco” 15: 138).

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The exchanges over Miranda’s allowance—and whether his role was in fact one “useful to the Public Service,” as Pitt put it—exemplify the hot and cold character of these first negotiations. By March of 1792, the long wait for a decision and the disagreements over funds had frustrated Miranda, and he decided to go to France. He did not go quietly, however. Before leaving, he disclosed details of his negotiations with Pitt to Lord Mountmorres (Hervey Redmond Morres), an Irish aristocrat who wrote opinion pieces on various issues of the day and reprinted them as The Letters of Themistocles, dedicating them to Horace Walpole (1795). Lord Mountmorres was a curious choice for an ally, since he had weighed in on the Nootka Sound controversy, reminding readers of “the many difficulties in which this country has been involved, by adventurers in South America,” the extravagance of Raleigh, and the “air of contraband adventure” that surrounded “the whole project of Nootka Sound” (117–18). Nevertheless, Miranda captivated him enough to get him to address the issue again in the “Preface” to his letters four years after the fact. The aristocrat was impressed with Miranda’s travels, noting: Had those generous and liberal patrons of real merit, the London booksellers, been possessed of the advantages the author enjoyed, in the perusal of those journals, which General de Miranda had composed in his travels through Europe, particularly in Russia and Turkey . . . they, doubtless would have purchased travels superior to those of any late writer; and infinitely beyond those of Cox, or any of the present fashionable and superficial compilers. (xv)

Miranda, who counted Alexander Dalrymple’s Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean and John Hawkesworth’s A New Voyage Round the World Performed by Captain James Cook among his travel books, must have been pleased at this compliment. Mountmorres also borrowed from Miranda “a most interesting treatise, as the work of the late King of Sweeden . . . the best abridgement that has appeared of the present state of northern politics” (xiii). Despite his praise for Miranda’s learning and connections, he distanced himself from him, calling Miranda “a soldier of fortune” (xii). The Monthly Review, however, was not persuaded of Mountmorres’s disapproval in their review of the Letters. They called “Lord M.” on the “[insinuation] that the establishment of the southern whale fishery had not so much for its object the acquisition of oil, spermaceti, and whalebone as the emancipation of South America from the dominion of Spain” (“The Letters” 471). The Monthly Review discredited Miranda as a source

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on the grounds that he “felt authorized to complain of our ministers, from whom he conceived he had reason to expect a pension, but who disappointed him” (“The Letters” 471). The Irish peer did not leave The Monthly Review’s challenge to his judgment of Miranda’s character unanswered. In a letter published in the following issue, he reiterated Miranda’s “unreserved assertion and information . . . that though this business of Nootka Sound and the whale fishery, at the Antipodes, was the supposed cause of the war, yet the true object and design of the contest in 1790 was the commercial emancipation of Spanish America, the destruction of the monopoly of the mother country” (“Correspondence” 120). He went as far as to call Miranda “the most extensive and enlightened traveler he had known or heard of,” and lamented that the government did not grant Miranda a pension, since he would have been “a great national acquisition” (“Correspondence” 120). Believing in Miranda’s diplomatic potential, Lord Mountmorres even offered to pay him an allowance to stay in Britain, “an offer which was honourably declined as it was liberally proposed” (“Correspondence” 120). Mountmorres’s generosity in offering the money was no less in disclosing his transaction with Miranda, which cleared the latter from the suspicion raised by the Monthly Review that his motives “for complain” were pecuniary. If anything, Pitt’s government was shortsighted in not doing everything to keep Miranda “when it may now be stated as a great truth . . . that most of the calamities, which have befallen the empire in this calamitous and misconducted war, have arisen from an ignorance of the different nations of Europe; and the want of able men” (“Correspondence” 120). Mountmorres’s defense of Miranda is more remarkable in light of the fact that by 1795, Miranda had fought for France in the Battle of Neerwinden and had published his Original Correspondence. It was well known that “Dumourier attributed the loss of the Battle of Neerwinden to Miranda” (“Anecdotes” 9), and the Correspondence served to set the record straight. Despite their censure of Mountmorres, the Monthly Review asserted that Miranda’s letters manifest the abilities and prudence of that officer; while those of Dumourier serve to confirm the general opinion of the enterprising spirit, but flighty and random conduct, of that commander in chief. If Miranda calculated that his letters with Dumourier would be an object circulating around Europe, he did not feel the same about his South American papers. Once the negotiations with Pitt had floundered, Miranda had demanded the return of all his “papers, maps, and accounts [ . . . ] without keeping copies or translations” (15: 139). Miranda’s anxiety over the originals can be partially attributed to the

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strategic and military value of all the materials he had assembled. Yet for a man who had reneged his “mother country”—or rather, who was trying to create an independent republic—the books, maps, and papers legitimated his authority and coalesced his identity as the potential liberator of South America. Miranda became identified with his books, as Lord Mountmorres and those who met him remarked. Joel Barlow stated that “[f]rom the abyss of despotism where to read was prohibited, where to think was a crime, where the only literature that circulated was steeped in ignorance, this South American [ . . . ] discovered that he was a man, that all men were equal [ . . . ] that it was his duty to teach this lesson, to overthrow thrones, and to liberate his native land” (qtd. in Robertson 1: 137). The connection between Miranda, reading, and statesmanship strengthened, if anything, during his interlude in France. Visitors remarked on his “select little library [ . . . ] a visitor might indeed believe himself at Athens in the house of Pericles” (qtd. in Robertson 1: 150). After the fiasco at the Battle of Neerwinden, Miranda was arrested with other Girondistes when Robespierre came to power, and Helen Maria Williams visited him in prison. Miranda was “determined not to be dragged to the guillotine, and had therefore provided himself with poison. Thus armed, he sent for a considerable number of books from his library, and placed them in his little chamber. Here he told me, that he endeavored to forget the present situation in the study of history and science” (Eye-Witness 133). The figure Miranda presents of a general reading while waiting for death shows the deliberate connection he cultivated between statesmanship and literacy, one that for a European audience confirmed his “philosophical mind” (Eye-Witness 133). The publication of his Occasional Correspondence, and later Opinion du General Miranda sur La Situation Actuelle de la France (1795), evinces how Miranda kept an eye on his public reception in England. After his bitter parting with Pitt in 1792, Miranda could not have entertained renewing negotiations with the prime minister, but by the late 1790s the world had changed dramatically for both men. Events in the Caribbean reanimated South America’s heterotopic value. Toussaint Louverture’s defeat of the British at St. Domingue was offset by the seizure of Trinidad in 1797 and the modest successes in Suriname that Stedman popularized in his Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition. Thomas Picton, the island’s first British governor, had copies of letters he had received from Pitt’s cabinet translated and circulated in Caracas.14 The letters clearly refer to Miranda’s original proposals for English military assistance in exchange for free trade with South America. Henry Dundas, who had served briefly as

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home secretary, wrote to Picton, “The Object that I wish to particularly bring to your attention is the means that can be most adaptable for liberating the inhabitants of the neighboring continent from the oppressive and tyrannical system [of Spain]” (“To Thomas” 15: 171).15 The Spanish court got wind of Picton’s promotion of these ideas in Caracas in a document that listed “the principal advantages that the English would derive from the possession of Trinidad [ . . . ] the unlimited liberty of carrying on trade with the Provinces of Caracas and Cumana [ . . . ] with a view to encourage their discontent against the Spanish Government” (“Extract” 15: 174). Meanwhile, Miranda had met in Paris with other South American creoles “thereby broadening his movement and his perception of the challenges that faced them all” (Racine 138). The “Instruction” that resulted from their meeting in December called for the liberation of “l’Esclavage le plus absolu de prés de quatorze millions d’habitans” and offered Britain a payment of thirty million pounds for “une force maritime et une force terrestre” (Archivo 15: 199–200). It repurposed the idea of an alliance between Britain, the United States, and Latin America, which Miranda and Pownall had discussed in 1790, “former un balance de pouvoir capable de contenir l’ambition destructive et devastatrice du systéme français” (Archivo 15: 200).16 Finally, it promised that “the basis of a commercial treaty [with Britain] will be such that no manufacture will be prohibited from entering [South America]” (“Esquisse” 15: 201).17 When Miranda returned to England in January 1798, Pitt was again waiting for him at Hollwood, where Miranda headed two days after his arrival. After he was announced, Mr Pitt [ . . . ] vino a mí sin dilación—muy jovial y amistosamente me recibió efectivamente, felicitándome de mi buella llegada, y recordándome que hacía 8 años que en aquel mismo paraje nos habíamos juntados por primera vez, sobre el propio importante asunto [ . . . ] que ahora las circunsctancias eran muy differentes a las de entonces, pues la Inglaterra estaba en guerra abierta con la España. [Mr Pitt came without delay, and received me jovially and in a friendly manner, congratulating me on my happy arrival, and reminding me how we had met eight years before on the same important matter [ . . . ] that now circumstances were very different, because England was in open war with Spain.] (“Diario” 15: 266)

The two men picked up where they had left off, and Pitt enthusiastically stated that Britain would “be happy to collaborate with [South]

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America in this enterprise.” Miranda detailed again the system of government he thought would be best—one that followed the British model. Pitt warned against the “calamities of the abominable French system,” and Miranda reassured him that the enterprise of Latin American Independence was “to prevent a contagion [ . . . ] of the monstrous and abominable principles of false French Liberty” in the Americas (“Diario” 15: 267). Pitt was persuaded of Miranda’s moderate principles, since he had read Miranda’s Opinion General (1795). After this warm welcome, Miranda set about gathering lists, maps, and pamphlets once more, detailing the plan for a grand Atlantic Alliance composed of Great Britain, South America, and the United States. His confidence in Britain’s support rebounded, and he believed that negotiations advantageous to his plan were underway. The hoped-for conclusion did not come that year. Miranda’s letter to the prime minister a year after their affable reunion urged Pitt to “faire une response franche et sans delai” [make a frank response and without delay] regarding South America (“Au Tres” 15: 344). Miranda added the containment of French power as yet another reason why it was in Britain’s interest to assist South America. Because Britain was the only country capable of resisting France, as the king had told Parliament, Miranda felt encouraged to approach Britain once again since “l’object principal des Colonies étoit de s’opposer á ces mêmes principes, en formant un gouvernement estable. sur des bases diamétralment opposées au sistéme français” [the principal object of the South American colonies is to oppose these same principles in forming a stable government on a diametrically opposite basis to the French system] (“Au Tres” 15: 344). He reminded Pitt that the French had at one point offered Miranda the governorship of St. Domingue and an army so that he could revolutionize the continent from the Caribbean, and that he had declined their offer fearing “les principes anarquiques qui fermentoient dejá” which would have caused the “ruine totale” of the New World (“Au Tres” 15: 344). On the one hand, the reminder highlighted Miranda’s prudence in not taking charge of the explosive situation in St. Domingue, one that contrasted with Pitt’s ill-fated decision to get involved there.18 On the other, it also alerted Pitt to the possibility that France could become Britain’s substitute and take the lead in the American hemisphere. By the end of 1799, Miranda was being referred to as “el hombre de Mr. Pitt—Mr. Pitt’s man.” He believed yet again that “se realizarían mis esperanzas y ejecutarían mis bellos planes” [my hopes would be realized and my beautiful plans would be executed” (“Conferencia” 15: 377). Yet it would not be until Pitt was succeeded by Henry

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Addington that Miranda’s plans were given serious consideration by the admiralty. The eventual failure of Miranda’s expedition in 1806, which sought to start a continental revolution in loose concert with Hiram Popham’s botched “liberation” of Buenos Aires, dampened British enthusiasm for South America but did not extinguish it altogether. Miranda knew that El Dorado beckoned, and continued to emphasize the economic benefits to be gained by Britain. He stressed over and over that “the present object of consideration is of no less import that whether Britain or France should have the Alliance of the Spanish American People in a way to command the Sources of the Revenues; and to have the ascendant possession of their commerce” (“Precis” 16: 52). As late as 1809, proponents of British intervention in South America repeated the connection between liberation and commerce. In the article that he coauthored with Miranda, James Mill wrote, A country far surpassing the whole of Europe in its extent [ . . . ] is, after a few prudent steps on our part, ready to open to us the immense resources of her territory, of a population at present great [ . . . ] and of a position unparalleled on the face of the globe for the astonishing combination of commercial advantages which it appears to unite. (250)

Though Mary Louise Pratt attributes the wave of investment or “capitalist vanguard” in the Americas to Alexander Von Humboldt (146), it becomes clear that Miranda first employed the rhetoric of commerce and wealth, and the allure of silver and gold, to persuade Pitt and later ministers to make South America an object of Britain’s interests in the Americas, even as he sought its liberation. As he reminded Pitt, “My only views, now & always were, to promote the happiness and liberty of my own Country (South-America) excessively oppressed—and in doing so, to offer also great commercial advantages to England” (“Note” 15: 128).

Notes 1. The transformation of Atlantic capitalism at this juncture refined the transcontinental economic instruments needed to sustain the Atlantic slave trade, even as it developed the idea of the free market. Jeremy Smith writes Exact accounting practices, more sophisticated long-range credit and insurance arrangements, precise estimation of inputs of production, close and disciplining supervision of labor and an imperative to predict sometimes far off future economic movements are the components of this calculative culture.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

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Slavery had a special place in this consolidation of the premises of rationalized economy action. The merchant-bourgeois orientation that emerged in the slaving economy resembled supposed marked behavior in neo-liberal economics and rational choice theory. It is more soberly viewed as a cultural type that coexists with other conceptions of economic agency. (Smith 191–92) For a discussion of the continuities between capitalism in the Romantic period and contemporary global capital, see “Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton in Conversation,” Global Capitalism, ed. Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (New York: The New Press, 2000), 1–51. Elsewhere Smith anticipates the redistribution of European power in the Americas due to “native” resistance. The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. [ . . . ] What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. [ . . . ] At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force, which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. (Smith 590–591) See “An Account of Native Iron, found in South America, Communicated by Sir Joseph Banks,” Royal Society of London Philosophical Transactions 78:1 (1788): 170, and “An Account of the Discovery of the Mines of Potosi in South America,” Edinburgh Review 7:39 (1788): 170. Abolitionists also emphasized the connection between liberation and trade as an alternative to slavery. Equiano argued, “As the inhuman traffic of slavery is now taken into consideration in the British legislature, I doubt not, if a system of commerce was established in Africa, the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants would insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, & c. In proportion to civilization, so will be the consumption of British manufactures” (Equiano 233). See Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 243–315; Joselyn Almeida, “Blanco White and the Making of Anglo-Hispanic

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Jocely n M. A l meida Romanticism,” European Romantic Review 17 (2006): 437–56; Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, “ ‘Thy World, Columbus, Shall Be Free’: British Romantic Deviance and Spanish American Revolution,” European Romantic Review 17 (2006): 151–59. 6. For the most recent biography of Miranda, see Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003). A general reappraisal is offered in John Maher, ed., Franscisco de Miranda: Exile and Enlightenment (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2006). 7. “The alliance of Britain and Spain in June 1808 forced Miranda to accept defeat on the political front. He now changed tactics. Discarding discretion, he embarked on a campaign of propaganda in open collaboration with James Mill. Mill was ready to risk his own prospects through the opportunity of publishing in the leading intellectual journal of the time, The Edinburgh Review, a medium known to be open to South American subjects. The result was two celebrated articles, in which Mill supplied the writing, structure, and knowledge of reader interests, and Miranda the specialist evidence.” See John Lynch, “Francisco de Miranda: The London Years,” Franscisco de Miranda, ed. Maher, 40; James Mill, “Emancipation of Spanish America,” Edinburgh Review 26 (1809): 277–311. 8. Diego Saglia observes, Apart from propaganda and occasional verse, other types of literary figuration [of Spain] employed legends of Spanish colonial cruelty, the most famous instance being Sheridan’s celebrated and unashamedly jingoistic tragedy Pizarro, an adaptation of Koetzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru (1796) and staged at Dury Lane In 1799. [ . . . ] its cast included Jordan as Cora, John Phillip Kemble as Rolla and Sara Siddons as Elvira, and it became an instant cultural phenomenon. [ . . . ] Pizarro’s popular mythology of military and cultural opposition confirmed Spain as a textual site capable of allegorizing the tensions of the revolutionary period by a means of inherited patterns of national identification. (Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000], 43–44) I would add that Britain’s interest in Latin America during this period redirects the allegorical function of the text to be about the potential resistance of Americans to Spaniards. 9. For analyses of Southey’s Madoc and Latin America, see Nigel Leask, “Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America,” and Jocelyn Almeida, “Conquest and Slavery in Robert Southey’s Madoc and James Montgomery’s The West Indies,” Robert Southey and the Contests of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 133–66. See also Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, “The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism,” Sullen Fires across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism, ed. Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris-Koenig

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Woodyard (2006) Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. Orrin Wang, University of Maryland, January 2008, February 20, 2008, http:// www.rc.umd.edu/praxis. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Although Catherine was known for her many lovers, she tended to be serially monogamous and was involved with the Dashing Count Dmitri Momonov at the time. Furthermore, the Empress was 58 years old when they met, Miranda was just 36, and he himself described her love for him as “the affection of a mother.” Nevertheless, their relationship was intense enough to provoke Potemkin’s jealousy and Miranda’s former friend and protector began to try to hurry the foreigner on his way. (See Karen Racine, “Love in the Time of Liberation,” Maher, ed., Franscisco de Miranda, 100–101). For the use of metaphorization in the U.S. context, see Peter Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims’: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly Review 55: 3 (2003): 353–86. In a letter to Miranda, Juan Manuel de Gual, a Spanish American criollo, alludes to abolitionist iconography in rendering a “wished” illustration of the plight of his countrymen: “yo desearía que en todos los papeles se pusiese [ . . . ] una Hermosa lamina representando nuestros hermanos miserables y cargados de f ierros; el suelo ofreciendo el contraste de la fecundidad natural [I wish that in all the papers there was [ . . . ] a beautiful print representing our miserable brothers burdened with chains; the soil offering the contrast of natural fertility]” Archivo del General Miranda, vol. 16 (Caracas: Editorial Sur-Americana, 1929–50), 6. “La prohibición de libros, papeles erroneos y escandalosos, sobre la que se promulgaron diversas dispociciones: una real cédula de 18 de enero 1762, un decreto de Julio de 1763 y una segunda cédula de junio de 1768. Su función se vería limitada, desde luego, por el hecho de que la prohibición estuviera orientada a los objetos de desarraigar los errores y supersticions contra el dogma, al buen uso de la religión y a las opinions laxas que pervierten la moral christiana” (Rementeira 212–13). See Carlos Díaz Rementeira, “Caracterización general de los delitos públicos por falsedad o escándalo en relación con la actividad inquisitorial en el siglo XVIII,” La Inquisición en Hispanoamérica, ed. Abelardo Levaggi (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ciudad Argentina, 1997), 212–13. Picton is otherwise remembered for his public torture of Luisa Calderon, a young, free mulatto, and the scandalous trial that ensued. See James Epstein, “Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Piston and the Cause of Louisa Calderon,” American Historical Review 112: 3 (2007): 712–41. The original reads “El Objeto que por ahora deseo más particularmente encomendar a la atención de V.S. es los Medios que pueden ser

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Jocely n M. A l meida más adaptables para libertar los Habitantes del Continente vecino de esa Isla de Trinidad del sistema opresivo y tyranno que con mucho Vigor mantiene el Monopolio del Comercio bajo la capa de Registros Exclusivos que franquea el Gobierno.” 16. See John A. Schutz, “Thomas Pownall’s Proposed Atlantic Federation,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 26: 2 (1946): 263–68. 17. “Les bases de ce traité seraient telles que L’entrée d’aucune Denrée manufacturée ne serait prohibée.” 18. See David Geggus, “The Cost of Pitt’s Caribbean Campaigns, 1793– 1798,” The Historical Journal 26 (1983): 699–706.

Chapter 4

C h i l dr e n a s Su bj e c t a n d O bj ec t: S H E L L E Y V. W E S T B R O O K Lisbeth Chapin

Before any of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s six children was born, he had already invested into his ideas of childhood a complicated schema of power and influence that both objectifies and subjectifies the child, fictive or actual. Shelley’s ideas about children and childhood included, as biographer James Bieri notes, Socrates’s doctrine that reminiscences from an earlier life were the basis of knowledge and prompted him to stop a young mother carrying her infant across the Magdalen Bridge, inquiring of the dumbfounded woman, “Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?” (Bieri 131). In A Vindication of the Vegetable Diet (1813), the child brings an “unerring wisdom” of dietary choices; in Shelley’s poetry, the child presents an impervious and cheerful confidence or becomes a tragic victim found amidst the debris of the world. The Shelley v. Westbrook custody trial following the suicide of Shelley’s wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, was a watershed event in the poet’s life, an event that deepened and exacerbated his view of himself as a father and sharpened his purposes for images of the child in his poetry and prose. Shelley objectifies children as symbols and subjectifies them as parts of himself, especially in the role of victim. His letters before and during the trial offer a perspective through which to view this effect in his writings. In the letters, Shelley warns their recipients to protest against the destructive moral forces of the world, including their legal agency in the Court of Chancery that ruled against him.

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Shelley had married Mary Godwin just weeks before the onset of his custody trial with the Westbrooks that began on January 24, 1817, and it was to her that he wrote most often. Shelley had plenty to say about his feelings as a father and about the court system and those involved in the trial, but he seems to write more than to inform or comfort Mary at this time. Rather, Shelley writes to establish a solidarity not only with Mary but also with the other females involved, implicitly or explicitly: his daughter, Ianthe, born about three years earlier; his late wife, Harriet; Harriet’s sister, Eliza Westbrook; and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who had just given birth two weeks before to Byron’s daughter, Allegra. Shelley’s strategy to use his trial as a cautionary tale may be intended to absolve himself in part from his culpability in the circumstances of Harriet’s death. In these letters, Shelley imbues references to the female sex and to children with a sense of victimization in which he himself takes part. While he lost the custody trial and never saw Ianthe or Charles again, the court’s decision must have confirmed for the poet his role as champion of those who have no legal mechanism through which to declare their own rights, and, in speaking for them, he ennobles his own efforts. In a letter to Mary dated January 11, 1817, Shelley writes about the conditions under which the custody of his children by the late Harriet may be determined: If I admit myself or if Chancery decides that I ought not to have the children because I am an infidel; then the W[estbrook]s will make that decision a basis for a criminal information or common libel attack— But there is hopes [sic] by watchful resistance that the whole of this detestable conspiracy will be overthrown—For, if the Chancellor should decide not to hear their cause; & if our answer on oath is so convincing as to effect this, they are defeated. (Jones 1: 380)

The case was presided over by the arch-conservative Lord Eldon, first mentioned by Shelley in his 1812 An Address to the Irish People, citing his repression of the free press. Chancellor Lord Eldon also supported capital punishment for minor theft, once condemning a man to hanging for stealing seven shillings (Bieri 29). The “watchful resistance” Shelley mentions to Mary is the position of one who believes that he could be overthrown by a “conspiracy” or adversaries within a court whose moral stance was antithetical to his own. Shelley’s moral stance situates the female audience—in particular or in general—as victims who must resist the very patriarchal authority

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against which he himself is pitted. In the letters, Eliza Westbrook is at first described as corrupted (“libidinous and vindictive”) by her pursuit of her father’s wealth, then appealed to in a more conciliatory tone; Ianthe is one of his “unfortunate children, now more than ever dear to me”; Mary is referred to as “my only treasure” and urged to “cheer up”; Claire is championed to Byron; and Harriet is a victim of “awful and appalling horror.” Shelley presents himself as a principled character to the Chancery Court as well as to a female audience; he creates an image of himself as one who must resist the corruptive potential of a trial run by a court that was designed to “purge the conscience of the accused” (Kohler 545–89, 555). In his stance of “watchful resistance,” Shelley declares the boundary of public and private discourse to be a didactic one, especially for a female readership and particularly when there are children involved. In Shelley’s letter to Eliza Westbrook of December 18, 1816, eight days after Harriet’s body was recovered from the Serpentine, he writes that his “feelings of duty as well as affection, as a father, incite” him to see the separation of himself from his children as “an evil.” Of Ianthe, he says, “She has only one parent, & that parent, if he could ever be supposed to have forgotten them,—is awakened to a sense of his duties & his claims which at whatever price must be asserted & performed.” Shelley was also concerned about Ianthe’s feelings toward her absent father, urging Eliza to “refrain from inculcating prepossessions on her infant mind the most adverse to my views,” though he adds that he does “not think the worse of [her] for this” and in supplication, concludes, “the happiness of my child depends on your forbearance” (Jones 1: 376). In Harriet’s last letter before her suicide, she declares her intention that Eliza have custody of Ianthe and that Shelley have custody of their son, Charles, now two years old; Shelley knew this, having seen the letter sometime after Eliza, so Charles is not mentioned specifically here. In this letter to Eliza, Shelley makes it a point to add, “I had the strongest wish to consult your feelings in this affair.” He hoped to strengthen his position by noting that “the lapse of a few weeks” in delaying Ianthe’s going to her father, “would only render the execution of it more distressing to you.” In point of fact, Shelley probably had not seen Ianthe since April 1815, when she was twenty-two months old, and he knew that “Mr. Westbrook actively backed Eliza in keeping Shelley from the two children, who, at the time of their mother’s death, were in Warwick under the care of a minister” (Bieri 2: 25). Whatever his conflicted feelings about Harriet’s sister, Shelley positions his argument to her almost companionably as someone else who loves his children and who loved

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Harriet. In the letters, Shelley’s emphasis on his feelings as a parent clearly is intended to tramp the claims of a maidenly aunt’s affection by the unmarried Eliza. Shelley’s letter to Eliza notwithstanding, the Westbrooks did not surrender Charles and Ianthe but instead settled on them £2,000 in four annuities, and on January 10, 1817 petitioned the Court in the names of the children as plaintiffs, to prohibit Shelley from taking them. The trial began on January 24, and the decision of the Lord Eldon was rendered on March 17 against Shelley; when the guardianship was contested by both sides, Lord Eldon delayed the actual disposition of the children until July 25, 1818, when it was determined that they be put under the care of Dr. Thomas Hume, recommended by Shelley’s lead lawyer, P. W. Longdill. Shelley’s letter of December 16, 1816 to Mary, residing in Bath, attempts to involve her in his plans for his and Harriet’s children; he writes, Do you dearest & best seek happiness—where it ought to reside in your own pure & perfect bosom: in the thoughts of how dear and how good you are to me—how wise, how extensively beneficial you are perhaps now destined to become. Remember my poor babes Ianthe & Charles—how dear & tender a mother they will find in you—Darling William too! my eyes overflow with tears. (Jones 1: 370)

In his letter to her on January 11, he fears the full extent of the decision in Chancery Court against him—that he may lose custody even of William or any other children by Mary. Shelley describes to her Chancery Court, whose “process is the most insidiously malignant that can be conceived”; he continues: “They have filed a bill, to say that I published Queen Mab, that I avow myself to be an atheist & a republican” (Jones 1:380). The bill actually states of Shelley “that he has written and published a certain work called Queen Mab with notes and other works and that he has therein blasphemously derided the truth of the Christian Revelation and denied the existence of God as the Creator of the Universe” (Medwin 464). In the aforementioned January letter, Shelley writes, “Yet cheer up my own beloved Mary,” whom he also addresses as “my own darling Pecksie” and admonishes her “don’t fancy I’m disquieted so as to be unwell . . . I am, it is true earnest & active, but as far as relates to all highest hopes & you, my only treasure, quite happy.” Mary, Ianthe, Charles, and Harriet are positioned as vulnerable victims of deep sensitivities—potential or past—and are all considered as those Shelley must needs be protective

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of, or should have been more protective of, in Harriet’s case. Shelley implies that the act of his feelings being trampled—to use one of his favorite tropes—by the legal system is in broader terms an example to others, especially those who cherish the love of their children above adherence to religious doctrine. Yet Shelley may be excused in having expected the case to be decided in his favor. In English courts of the time the norm in custody cases was to declare the father sole guardian, even under the most objectionable circumstances. According to Caroline Sheridan Norton’s The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody of Infants Considered (1838), “the custody of legitimate children is held to be the right of the Father from the hour of their birth to the utter exclusion of the Mother, whose separate claim has no legal existence, and is not recognised by the Courts,” and that “no circumstance can modify or alter this admitted right of the father, though he should be living in open adultery, and his wife be legally separated from him on that account” (Norton 1). The father “is responsible to no one for his motives, should he desire entirely to exclude his wife from all access to her children,” whether or not his children ever live with him (Norton 2). In one case Norton cites, [A] Frenchman married to an Englishwoman, and wishing to compel a disposition of her property, entered by force the house where she had fled for refuge, dragged the child (which she was in the act of nursing) from the very breast; and took it away, almost naked, in open carriage, in inclement weather. The mother appealed to the Courts: the Courts decided they had no power to interfere. (Norton 4)

However, Norton continues that, in spite of this, the Court of Chancery can assume “the power of meeting and deciding on individual cases,” that they “will interfere . . . for the security of property, and on account of religious, or even political opinions”; she includes that there was a direct interference in the case of Shelley “and others of less note” (Norton 6). As explained in The Times of February 25, 1826, “when the minds of the children were likely to be tainted by the immorality of the father, the Court, upon being applied to for that purpose, had deprived him of their guardianship” and includes as an example, that the “children of Percy Bysshe Shelley had also been taken from their father, because he had intended to bring them up in the belief, or rather he should say the profession, of atheistical doctrines” (“Law Report” 3). The Shelley v. Westbrook case has been cited ever since as one of the rare legal judgments against the father in that century.

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Claire’s predicament as a new and unwed mother, whose child was fathered by Byron, prompted Shelley’s sympathy; in a letter to her dated December 30, 1816, he acknowledges “the loneliness and the low spirits which arise from being entirely left” alone (Jones 1: 378). Her situation must have resonated with some guilt for the poet, surely reminding him of Harriet’s desolation. Claire had a newborn daughter to care for and found Byron entirely unresponsive to her letters. Shelley, intending in some way to fulfill Byron’s role for her, writes to her: “Your letter today relieved me from a weight of painful Anxiety . . . the greatest good you can do me is to keep well and quiet” (Jones 1: 378). As with Mary, Shelley includes Claire in his protective circle of intimates so that, unlike Harriet, she is bereft only of Byron’s attention and not in complete despair or entirely on her own. Claire’s situation with Byron is markedly parallel to Harriet’s, considering the unnamed lover by whom Harriet was pregnant. James Bieri finds Claire’s account of Harriet’s lover “probably the most accurate available,” that he “was a Captain in the Indian or Wellington Army” who was “ordered abroad” (2: 21). Harriet lived near Chapel Street with a “decent couple” who believed that she was a lady’s maid and married and that her husband was abroad; Bieri informs us that “Eliza, wanting Harriet’s affair concealed from Shelley, apparently told her parents Harriet was visiting ‘friends in the country’ ” and that Harriet told her sister that Maxwell “did not really love her and meant to abandon her.” Her landlady stated that Harriet “appeared in the family way” and was “very desponding and gloomy” when she saw her last, in November (2: 21–22). However he felt about Harriet that fall, Shelley must have been thankful that the official verdict at her inquest on December 11, 1816 omitted any mention of prostitution or suicide, opting instead for the factually precise and morally neutral finding of “Found dead in the Serpentine River” (Rivers, “Burial” 327–9, 328). Fanny Imlay’s suicide by opium just two months earlier received the same verdict, “found dead”; she was buried in Swansea before Shelley arrived (Bieri 2: 14). That neither Shelley’s nor Mary’s correspondence mentions Fanny’s death at this time demonstrates, according to biographer Richard Holmes, “how secretive they could be about personal matters if they so chose” (Holmes 347). However, the disturbing fate of Fanny and Harriet was certainly one Shelley would want to spare Mary’s stepsister, and the vulnerability of Claire’s circumstance was clear to him. The Westbrooks did not come forward to claim the body, possibly so that the fiction of her pseudonym, “Harriet Smith,” could be preserved; “no reference to her advanced state of pregnancy was

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made in the coroner’s official report, and no account of the inquest was contained in the newspapers,” contrary to customary practices, as Bryan Rivers notes in his study of Harriet’s suicide (Rivers, “Burial” 327–29). One wonders if Shelley was thinking of Harriet and her narrow escape from the ignominy of the gruesome burial practices of suicides. Suicide victims were traditionally buried at cross-roads for centuries because “these were signs of the cross; because steady traffic over the suicide’s grave could help keep the person’s ghost down; and because ancient sacrificial victims had been slain at such sites”; in addition, the untreated body was unceremoniously wrapped in a sheet, a stake driven through the torso, and lime thrown over it (Gates 6). Public opposition to this tradition “had been steadily growing throughout the early nineteenth century” and eventually provoked an act of Parliament on July 4, 1823, “forbidding coroners from issuing warrants for the burial of suicides in public highways, and specifically banning the old practice of staking the body of the deceased,” Rivers notes (478–80, 479). The sad details of Harriet’s death certainly prompted grief and remorse in Shelley, who transferred some of those feelings into a vitriolic outburst against the Court in a letter to Byron of January 17, 1817; he describes being “dragged before the tribunals of tyranny and superstition, to answer with my children, my property, my liberty, and my fame, for having exposed their frauds, and scorned the insolence of their power” (Jones 1: 381). In these letters Shelley stands as a defender not only of liberty but also of all whom he considered vulnerable in the legal system and specifically Chancery Court, most particularly women and children. However justified Shelley believed his feelings and position to be regarding custody of his biological children, he must have been aware that his feelings would not enter into an argument with the Court of Chancery, conventionally described as “keeper of the king’s conscience” (Kohler 545–61, 553). As Michael Kohler explains, the Court of Chancery’s “inquisitorial modes—the injunction, discovery, and subpoena, the testimony under oath, the discretionary prerogative of the chancellor—operated according to principles of equity rather than of law”; this code prompted “Shelley into associating Chancery’s legal processes with a ‘superstitious’ effort to police moral and religious obligations through legal means.” In Chancery, “it was the judge who . . . discerned the truth of an accusation, and it was the judge or court agent who determined what actions each party would take to ensure justice” (Kohler 554–55). Interestingly, Lord Eldon’s tenure in the Chancery Court included the extraordinary judgment

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certifying George III’s sanity, in effect a “ ‘cancelling’ of the king’s own actions—his letters patent, decrees, pardons, etc.—when in conflict with the spirit of legislative or ancient-legal prescription” (Kohler 555). Just six years after the George III insanity ruling, authorities of the Chancery Court could have been more prone than ever to reestablishing stability and control in matters of family: and religion, such as in the Shelley v. Westbrook trial, unfortunately for Shelley. In his poem “To William,” written in 1817 about his son by Mary, Shelley may have hoped that poetry has the power to transform the wreckage of one’s life. “Come with me, thou delightful child,” he writes, “though the wave is wild, / And the winds are loose, we must not stay, / Or the slaves of the law may rend thee away” (5–8), alluding to the bitter custody dispute and the “slaves of law” in Chancery Court. The second stanza reads: “They have taken thy brother and sister . . . / They have made them unfit for thee; / They have withered the smile and dried the tear / Which should have been sacred to me” (10–13). William’s task in the poem is to recover the speaker’s optimism for life, “With fairest smiles of wonder thrown / On that which is indeed our own” (21–22), and the sacra via by which to accomplish this is through deliberate instruction in the Greek classics. The speaker explains, “I will teach thine infant tongue / To call upon those heroes old / In their own language, and will mould / Thy growing spirit in the flame / Of Grecian lore, that by such name / A patriot’s birthright thou mayst claim!” (45–51). The poetry of Socrates and Aeschylus, among others, has the potential for salvaging the flagging ideals of patriots everywhere, it would seem to Shelley. In this poem the child must establish a foundation for patriotism and liberty against the machine of state, a battle his father has lost. William’s instruction of the Greek poets is the antithesis to the catechism of “the priests of the evil faith” referred to in line twenty-six, the evil faith that divested Shelley of his children’s custody. For children, religious and serial respect were inextricably entwined and considered seriously as endangering not only their eternal souls but also their social standing. Alan Richardson remarks that the purpose of manuals for children in the Romantic period, such as Sarah Trimmer’s The Teacher’s Assistant: Consisting of Lectures in the Catechetical Form (1800), was to indoctrinate children about religion as well as class: their function in society, where they came from, what social class in which they were to remain, what they should be thankful for, and how much work they should be expected to shoulder (Richardson “The Politics of Childhood,” 853–68, 854). In “To William,” Shelley’s speaker treats the boy as a tabula rasa on which to write a

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different set of ideals; both forms of instruction, it could be argued, are intended to benefit the child. Both imply that one’s functioning in society is the extent to which one can operate without question within the dominant established directives of the educational system. Although the ideology of the writers Shelley recommends for William differs greatly from that of the Anglican Church, the same points about social function and class could apply equally to a classical education. The message in both is clear. The pupil’s success in memorizing the answers or espousing the ideology determines how optimistic the adults around him will be. Shelley’s poem “To Ianthe,” written three years earlier in 1813, differs most from “To William” in its buoyancy of tone and idealization of Shelley’s infant daughter by Harriet. It begins, “I love thee, Baby! For thine own sweet sake, / Those azure eyes, that faintly dimpled cheek, / Thy tender frame, so eloquently weak” (1–3), assigning to her the qualities of beauty and weakness. With these gendered descriptors Ianthe as passive infant (“All that thy passive eyes can feel impart,” 8) suggests all female members of society, infantilized in a legal system that rarely granted custodial rights to mothers. The last four lines of this sonnet emphasize that the child is “Dearest” to the speaker “when most thy tender traits express / The image of thy mother’s loveliness.” Because we know that Shelley’s and Harriet’s marriage was fundamentally less stable than the absolute conviction the poem conveys, the speaker’s strategy is to adopt a visual idealization by reducing the mother and child symbiosis merely to one of “loveliness” (14). In this way, a union of the two creates the image of an unconflicted motherhood, fatherhood, and marriage. While each poem is addressed to an actual child of Shelley’s, the subjects become objectified into symbols of innocence and vulnerability made more potent by the speaker’s intensity. The difference in the poems before and after the trial is that Ianthe does not have to resurrect the remnants of a speaker’s crisis of faith (or fatherhood); the child in “Ianthe” functions as an ideal of all females, dependent on society to be her patriarchal protector, at least in the Shelleys’ social strata. In Laon and Cythna, begun near the end of the trial in March 1817, children are victims whose suffering is intended to inspire dramatic action from those who defend them. Laon travels through a gory field where “Women, and babes, and men, slaughtered confusedly” (VI.46) lay, but also through a village where a woman, symbol of prostitution and venereal disease, tries to contaminate Laon when she kisses him. “My name is Pestilence” (VI.49), she says, and “This bosom dry, / Once fed two babes,” connecting the lack of

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being able to nurse her children with the death and violence around her. Pestilence could be an allusion to the hapless Harriet Shelley, whose troubles, broadened by sexual impropriety, consumed her. If so, this dramatizes Shelley’s contention that the corruptive forces of society, including Christian dogma and the legal system, claim both women and children as victims. Similarly, Cythna suffers most after she becomes a mother and her child is taken from her. When Cythna’s “reason” is restored to her, the “dream” of motherhood becomes “like a beast / Most fierce and beauteous” who has “made its lair” in her memory and “on [her] heart did feast” (VII.25). Although Christine Kenyon-Jones contends that this scene can be construed not as Shelley’s “envy of a beneficent function, but instead a complex revulsion” of motherhood, through the perspective of the trial it is more clearly a metaphor for grief as a raging animal that feeds on “thoughts which could not fade,” thoughts of “Some smile, some look, some gesture which had blessed” Cythna herself (VII.25) (Kenyon-Jones 37). By portraying children and their suffering mothers as sympathetic victims, Shelley intends us to comprehend the unnaturalness of the conditions under which we suffer, everything from war to a diseased mind; and to have a child removed from her mother is paramount to the most horrendous severing of sacred ties, Shelley implies. Consequently, both mother and child suffer unduly. Written during and after his custody trial, Laon and Cythna highlights the victimization of parents separated from their children, and Shelley elaborately develops the horrific images from a self-righteous stance. It is Cythna’s daughter, “That fairest child” (XII.6) and a curiously unreal character, who pleads for Laon’s life. She swoons when he is about to be executed, but later explains that she did so “from the calm of love” (XII.26), after which she enters a realm between life and death, and eventually leads Laon and Cythna to her boat, steady and “Calm as a shade,” in which they sail, their “minds full / Of love and wisdom” (XII.39, 37). It is this child to whom Laon had brought food when she and her father were hungry. Calmness, love, and the purity of a selfless child can transform the conditions under which people suffer, Shelley implies. None of these, he would contend, was applied in Chancery Court in March 1817. As in the poems to Ianthe and William the child motif in this poem remains a static character, an objectification of purest childhood. In Rosalind and Helen, begun in the summer of 1817, Shelley portrays the child as one who sacrifices in order to bring an opportunity for revelation to adults, specifically to mothers. In a preface to the poem, Shelley writes, “[I]f, by interesting the affections and amusing

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the imagination, it awakens a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the reception of more important impressions, it will produce in the reader all that the writer experienced in the composition.” The “ideal melancholy” could be a certain poignancy brought on by memories of the children he was not to see again; if so, melancholy of that order should produce some kind of enlightenment or self-discovery arising from so great a cost. Largely considered a minor poem in Shelley’s oeuvres, Rosalind and Helen can also be seen as “a signal example of how his writing and his developing conception of his life as a writer can intertwine so as to blur the common-sense distinction between actuality and art, subject and representation” and particularly, I would contend, as it relates to Shelley’s custody trial (Donovan 241–73, 244). It is a melancholy story: Helen and Rosalind are exiles, and each has suffered deeply, either because of love for her children, in Rosalind’s case, or for her husband, in Helen’s case. At some point, each child is a solace to the mother in times of woe; in addition, each child achieves a peace denied to the parents. To Rosalind, her nursing children bring her “soothing tears, / And a loosening warmth, as each one lay / Sucking the sullen milk away,” and, in that act, not only they but, eventually, she herself was “weaned . . . / From that sweet food,—even from the thirst / Of death, and nothingness, and rest” (396–97, 401–3). After the death of her brutal husband, his will stipulates that she must leave her children and go into exile or they would lose their inheritance. Rosalind’s daughter, “a lovely child . . . of looks serene . . . grace and gentleness” is eventually returned to her and thereby restores to some degree a sense of “joy” and “new calm” to her mother (1283). Helen’s son was fathered by Lionel, a Shelley-like visionary who dies following a false conviction and jail term; the parallels are obvious, though art achieves what life could not: the peaceful alliance of two families. Helen’s son and Rosalind’s daughter grow together in love, “And in their union soon their parents saw / The shadow of the peace denied to them” (1290– 1291). It is not the suffering that is the revelation, Shelley implies, but the calm and peace that come with a loved child—here an idealized and undeveloped character, objectified to serve that purpose. The biographical and symbolic also converge in Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems,” which, as in Shelley’s case, resist simplification in that convergence. Mark Jones points out that “no practice in the ‘Lucy Poems’ criticism is more popular than that of identifying Lucy with biographical originals such as Dorothy Wordsworth” but that “biographical identifications give way to symbolist identifications: Lucy

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becomes primarily a meaning (‘light,’ ‘inspiration,’ ‘illusion’) rather than a person” (Jones 96–105, 101). Even if, as Richard Matlack concludes, “Lucy became not so much an exact equivalent of Dorothy as an amorphous, and thus safe, object for the hostilities Dorothy aroused, these studies show that the biographical data compounds the complexity of interpretive positions rather than reduces it. In short, for both poets their personal circumstances begin artistic ventures that continue into their other work, certainly beyond the original biographical signification” (Matlack 46–65, 46). Jones goes as far as to assert that “the dialectical romantic symbol, that which both is and means . . . [of] which Lucy is such a symbol,” is “properly reducible neither to material human being nor to idea, and hence essentially unknowable” (Jones 102). The Lucy in Wordsworth’s poems may not be as fixed as or even as expansive a referent as has been presumed, but it serves as a focal point for our scrutiny of subjectification and objectification, our definition of the actual and the symbolic. Practically speaking, Shelley’s biographical circumstances are not comparable to Wordsworth’s; but it is likely both poets assumed their reputations and other biographical data would come into the reading of their work. By those assumptions, they employed these referents as a poetical device in order to deter readers seeking to choose between the relevance of the abstract and the actual in furthering a poem’s impact. A year after the trial’s decision was handed down, in March 1818, Shelley and his entourage left England for Italy. Shelley would never return to England and, in a letter to Leigh Hunt dated March 22, he writes, “before I left London, my spirits were as feeble as my health,” but that both improved in Italy (Jones 2: 459). He adds in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock in April about Italy: “the loveliness of the earth & the serenity of the sky made the greatest difference in my sensations—I depend on these things for life for in the smoke of cities & the tumult of humankind & the chilling fogs & rain of our own country I can hardly be said to live” (Jones 2: 460). Nevertheless, the recuperative effects of Italy would waver in the face of two tragedies suffered by the Shelleys: the death of their daughter, Clara, on September 24, 1818, aged one year and three weeks, and nine months later, the death of their son William, aged three years and a half. Both children died of illness; and Mary would blame Shelley in Clara’s death, whose illness was exacerbated by the hardships of their travel that summer, travel taken in spite of Mary’s reluctance to be on the road with her child (Bieri 2: 80). Neither of Shelley’s children by Harriet would see him again. Ianthe was placed under the guardianship of Dr. and Mrs. Hume and

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educated at home; their plan was that Ianthe would shun fashionable clothes. To the Humes, such accoutrements violated “all feelings of feminine Delicacy and Decency,” and they insisted that Ianthe avoid reading most novels (Bieri 2: 31). She was also prohibited from reading “any books that might tend to shake her faith “in any of the great points of the established religion,” which would include Queen Mab, after the heroine of which she had been named (Orange 38–52, 43). Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy, acquired guardianship of his grandson, Charles Bysshe, sending him to Syon House Academy, as Shelley had been. Sadly, Charles died at age eleven of tuberculosis at Field Place on September 11, 1826. Charles’s parents’ names were on the burial notice, but on his burial plaque in Warnham Church, Charles was listed only as the grandson of Sir Timothy Shelley and Lady Elizabeth Shelley (Bieri 2: 352). Ianthe married in 1837 and had seven children; she died “just before her sixty-third birthday in 1896 and is buried under a copper beech tree in the Cothelstone Churchyard, Somerset” (Bieri 2: 354). At her request, her headstone reads “Daughter of the Poet Shelley” (Bieri 2: 354). In truth, Shelley’s daughter never knew him as a father, for all intents and purposes, and she had outlived both her parents by age nine. Perhaps Shelley would have thought it worth a poem that both her parents died by drowning in those early years of her life. After the Shelley v. Westbrook custody trial, following so soon after Harriet’s suicide as well as Fanny Imlay’s two months earlier, Shelley incorporates into his work more than the tragic bitterness that resulted from these events. In his writing that follows, the child as referent is subjectified with the material circumstances of Shelley’s own life while simultaneously objectified in an ambitious symbolism. This new complexity finds the center of his poetry and expands there. Shelley’s letters direct us to this effect; his poems continue it. “I hope to have a large family of children,” Shelley once wrote while married to Harriet; of six children born, only two lived to adulthood: Ianthe and Percy Florence Shelley, born on November 12, 1819, who would also barely know his father (Jones 1: 162). The experience and outcome of the battle for custody of his children isolated the poet (by grief, anger, and guilt) and isolated the function of the child distinctively in his work. Throughout his writing life, every particular in the phenomenal world—no less the most deeply personal—carried the potential for objectification; and as an object, its opaqueness is intended to attempt a transparency of the human soul.

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Chapter 5

“I’l l C on t r i v e a Sy lva n Room” 1 : C e r ta i n t y a n d I n de t e r m i nac y i n C h a r l o t t e Sm i t h’s B E AC H Y H E A D , T H E F A B L E S , A N D O T H E R P O E M S (18 0 7) Mark K. Fulk

Introduction The publication of Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head, Fables, and Other Poems in 1807 not only marked the end of an illustrious career but also represented the epistemological breakdown that occurred in Britain as a result of the Napoleonic wars. The fables that follow Beachy Head in the 1807 edition mediate the moral and epistemic conflicts that shape Beachy Head, which reflects the concomitant breakdown of these certainties within wider British culture in the early Romantic era. By situating Smith’s fables in relation to the genre of the fable in the Enlightenment, we can better understand Smith’s turn to this form as a way of dealing with and ultimately containing the epistemic collapse that is recorded in Beachy Head. As a way of situating this study within the broader context of Romanticism and theory, I turn to the notions of late style and Romantic indeterminacy. Women writers such as Smith have traditionally been marginalized in discussion of key Romantic paradigms such as these. However, critics such as Anne K. Mellor2 and studies of women’s relationships to the epistemology of their times, like that of Anne Kelley,3 have gone a long way toward bringing women writers

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and thinkers into mainstream discussions of their periods and complicating these unapologetically phallocentric paradigms. My study of Beachy Head and the fables seeks as well to broaden these theories beyond their narrow application to male Romantic authors.

A Problem at B E ACHY H E A D The epistemic crisis in Beachy Head has been well documented by many of its readers. Beachy Head is a long, incomplete poem that begins the final collection of Smith’s work. Stuart Curran, in his 1993 introduction to his edition of this volume, notes the ambivalence he finds therein, explaining that Beachy Head, Fables, and Other Poems enacts “an alternative Romanticism that seeks not to transcend or absorb nature but to contemplate and honor its irreducible alterity” (Curran xxvii–xxviii). It strikes me that Curran’s point adequately accounts for the strangeness of Beachy Head within the Romantic canon of fragmented poems, but fails to account for Smith’s turn to fables. Beachy Head’s breakdown of meaning is signified symbolically even by its associations with the English coast. This Dover coastline became associated with suicide and death as early as the seventh century, “when St. Wilfrid found the locals jumping off after a three-year drought” (Fletcher 330); it is also the site where Gloucester attempts suicide after the loss of his eyes in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The instability in Beachy Head’s epistemology that Curran identifies in his use of the term “alterity” has, since the publication of this introduction, been more fully explored by other critics. Anne D. Wallace in her recent article “Picturesque Fossils, Sublime Geology?: The Crisis of Authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head” adumbrates the various crises that Smith explores in her opening text. Wallace argues that the “empirical reasoning which underwrites not only science and history, but picturesque and sublime aesthetics” fails to operate as a “way of knowing” in the poem. The second half of Beachy Head, accordingly, “unwrites its own aesthetics” and fails to offer “any new positive authority for its art” (Wallace 79). Furthermore, Jacqueline M. Labbe in her study Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Culture of Gender concludes that in Beachy Head, readers “have gone in search of a poet, and have found instead a most appropriate memorial: one that dramatizes disguise, infiltrates and fragments subjectivity, and assumes and discards aspects of identity as easily as the costuming they are” (162).4 Beachy Head thus undoes Romantic epistemology, seeking but not finding a form that would fulfill Smith’s

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longing for more certainty and knowledge in this time of personal and international turmoil. Even those critics who view Beachy Head as a more integrated work than Labbe or Wallace take notice of the role that the treacherous times of 1806 play in its formation. John M. Anderson argues in a seminal article that the fragmentary nature of Beachy Head is an intentional construct by Smith herself. He argues that the “fragmentary form this poem takes is not entirely an accident—that Smith was attracted to the idea of constructing a ruin, of using fragments expressively” (J. Anderson 547). Using the definitional framework developed for the Romantic fragment articulated by Marjorie Levinson in The Romantic Fragment Poem (1986), Anderson presents Beachy Head as an integral work that is in nature an “elliptical and self-referential collage” (551). He concludes about Beachy Head that, ultimately, it is a “kind of faithful rethinking, reforging, and assemblage of materials from the range of Charlotte Smith’s reading and her entire poetic career. It is composed of fragments resembling, perhaps, bits of elephant and dinosaur bones that we have already rummaged through in this naturalist’s portmanteau of a poem” (574). Building on the conclusions that Anderson draws, Paula R. Backscheider also reflects on Beachy Head’s relationship to its own age, contending that [h]aving experienced internal divisions, the American and French revolutions, and the threat of Napoleon, Smith goes back to the values expressed in Gray’s great Elegy, affirms their permanence, and invigorates them with the defiance of France that England’s situation required. [ . . . ] Moving easily from the sublime to the poetry of simple rural life made so familiar during the last decades of the century, she captures a moment of national anxiety, one quite precisely aware of how much could be lost even as such things as Great Britain’s global economy were taken for granted. (365–66)

What Backsheider views as a return to georgic idealism is painted against a chaotic background of a present that has already lost the moral certitude of the past and its generic equivalence in the georgic didactic genre of the previous age. There is more indeterminacy in Beachy Head than Backscheider detects in her reading of the poem, although she diagnoses the causes for this uncertainty. Everything about Beachy Head points in the direction of this loss of assurance for the persona. The persona

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that Smith creates for Beachy Head tells her audience that she would rather “recline” and rest, but hopes that “Fancy” can still “represent the strange and awful hour / Of vast concussion” when “the Omnipotent” rent England from the European shore (5–8). Even though Smith disputes this narrative of how England came to be an isle in her gloss, the notion of a cataclysmic separation stands actually (in the land itself) and symbolically (in the tensions between England, France, and the rest of Europe in the Napoleonic years). The chronological setting of the poem is dusk, a time of turning toward rest, but also the border between day and night, presenting the dim hint that things may be changing, but not for the better. Smith’s descriptions of the landscape further darken this symbolism. As noted earlier, she describes the land as having suffered a “vast concussion”; she further describes it as “rifled” and “Eternally divided” from the European coast (5, 9–10). Smith mentions the view from the “chalky clefts” (20) of these headlands, which are now eroding to reveal fossils. This section ponders questions of time and the permanence of all things, and even beyond the material, to nature herself. The persona reflects on her “wondering” about the “strange and foreign forms / Of sea-shells” in the “calcareous soil” in the cliffs (373–75). These observations lead to a series of questions that suggest that Nature herself is mocking humankind. Smith asks: Does Nature then Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world? Or did this range of chalky mountains, once Form a vast bason, where Ocean waves Swell’d fathomless? (378–84)

An affirmative answer to either question would be troubling: if we answer yes to the first question, then Nature becomes a trickster, “wanton” like a harlot. If we answer yes to the second, then land itself is fragile for if it were once overwhelmed by the sea, it could be again. The shells themselves point toward this uncertainty. As Wallace writes, these shells move from the picturesque toward the sublime, “despite their minuteness [ . . . ] associated with the mountainous, the oceanic, the terrific, and the incomprehensible” (Wallace 77). These fossil shells open up an epistemic crisis, according to Wallace, leading Smith “into a meditation on the inefficacy of science and history” and offering a critique of the picturesque and the sublime theory

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of William Gilpin (Wallace 78–79). Indeed, in the following section, Smith is her most disparaging of scientific certainty, calling its “proudest boast” “vain,” and arguing that it lends “but a little light [ . . . ] To its most ardent votaries”; ultimately, it offers only “conjecture, / Food for vague theories, or vain disputes” (390–94). Donna Landry convincingly argues that this critique of science represents the outsider status of women in thinking and writing about science, especially the emerging field of geology. Landry reasons that the very category of gender [in the arena of the natural sciences of the early Romantic period] [ . . . ] [with] women watching from the sidelines [ . . . ] stands explored in sharp relief as a power differential. Such gender dynamics give the whole question of women’s poetry as an object of study a new coherence and urgency” (Landry 468).

However, I believe this section of the poem goes even further than Landry’s argument portends, suggesting that science is as uncertain as the times for anyone,woman or man. Even Smith’s contrastive pairing of science in this passage with the peasantry and their “daily task” offers little to no consolation (395), as Smith reflects that their work and very presence leave No traces in the records of mankind, Save what these half obliterated mounds And half fill’d trenches doubtfully impart To some lone antiquary. (403–6)

If the landscape and science and even the working peasantry offer little consolation and only add to the sense of belatedness that the poem conjures, neither do the nation and its power offer any redress. Smith describes England as currently rent by “a world in arms” (153) with no complete victory in sight. She draws a parallel with ancient Britain and the Anglo-Norman period, noting that even they—like the ruins of Dover Castle that once crowned the hillside of Beachy Head but now crumble into oblivion—are now mostly lost in the murky past. These and other moments that indicate doubt and the erosion of faith in a reasonable, progressive world mark Beachy Head as a work that fits both Geoffrey Hartman’s landmark notion of Romantic indeterminacy and Edward Said’s articulations of late style, based in the criticism of Beethoven’s late works by Theodor Adomo. These two paradigms, however, because of their creators’ overlooking or even outright exclusion of women writers, were not shaped by the study of women Romantics but only their male counterparts. This

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oversight is especially sad because, by bringing Romantic women into this dialogue, these paradigms are refined and made more inclusive and thus more useful to future scholars. In Geoffrey Hartman’s seminal book Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today, first published in 1980 and reissued with a new foreword in 2007,5 he defines the idea of Romantic indeterminacy and how it opens up the possibility of radically new readings of the major Romantic lyrics. In his adumbration of this idea, Hartman defines indeterminacy and its effects as follows: indeterminacy in a text “suggests (1) that where there is a conflict of interpretations or codes, that conflict can be rehearsed or reordered but not always resolved, and (2) that even where there is no such conflict we have no certainty of controlling implications that may not be apparent or articulable at any one point in time” (265). He further clarifies this term when he describes “[i]ndeterminacy as a ‘speculative instrument’ [that] should influence the way literature is read, but by modifying the reader’s awareness rather than by imposing a method. [ . . . ] It encourages a form of writing [ . . . ] that is not subordinated naively to the search for ideas” (269). Several of the critics cited earlier, especially Landry, have described Beachy Head in a way that implies its implementation of something akin to this concept of indeterminacy. By taking up and discarding ways of being and presenting oneself in the world—as Labbe has argued—Smith produces what Hartmann refers to as a work that “modifies” the reader’s awareness without introducing a new methodology that the reader needs to imbibe to understand her world. Smith’s open-ended fragmentation in the poem, whether intentional or not, creates a work that does not merely propound ideas but rather traces the crisis of her times and leaves the questions open in a way that can radically reshape her readers’—and her own—conclusions on life and the nature of the cosmic order. Indeterminacy suggested through open-endedness in a work, especially in relation to uncertainty in the times and the ways that it undoes the writer’s ethos, are significant characteristics of what Edward Said calls late style. Building on and systematizing Theodor Adomo’s writings on the late style of Beethoven, Said takes his approach and applies it broadly to literature, music, and film. Said is clear that late style does not simply signify that a writer has reached the end of her career, but that this can be a factor in a writer’s adoption of late style. Smith’s health at the end of her life was precarious and her finances were at their worst possible ebb. She was supporting more children on her limited funds, including her daughter

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Lucy, Lucy’s no-account husband Thomas Newhouse, and their three children. In his introduction to the critical edition of Smith’s final (though incomplete) novel Letters of a Solitary Wanderer—a massive 1,600-page epistolary work—David Lorne MacDonald writes that Smith was “disabled by obesity and arthritis” and “exhausted by the interminable lawsuit over her father-in-law’s will.” He borrows a term of description from William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott, referring to Smith as “this galley-slave of the imagination” who “nevertheless soldiered on” (vii).6 Late style goes further than this end-of-life scenario. In the ultimate chapter of On Late Style, Said describes late style as descriptive of works that “are beyond their own time, ahead of it in terms of daring and startling newness, later than it in that they describe a return or homecoming to realms forgotten or left behind by the relentless advancement of history” (135). Smith’s representation of the crumbling Norman structure and her reflections on ancient times in Beachy Head certainly enact this kind of return that poses the past against the “relentless” forward-movement of modernity. Further, what Anderson figures as Beachy Head’s “kind of faithful rethinking, reforging, and assemblage of materials from the range of Charlotte Smith’s reading and her entire poetic career” (574) without doubt captures what Said calls a “return” or “homecoming” to the previous material of a poet’s career. Said furthers his definitional adumbration by observing that late style contains “a montage of beginnings and endings”7 (136), which is clearly confirmed in Beachy Head by Anderson’s description of the poem in his article’s title as a “Romantic [ . . . ] Mosaic,” a synonym for montage. Said reflects that there will appear in these works “lateness, perhaps even decadence, in style and primitivism in content” (137).8 Smith’s primitivism in her return to the fossils of the earth and the history of ancient Britain has already been well noted; however, her references in Beachy Head to shepherds and their lives, which interrupt her poem with two inset songs, also figure this metaphoric return that Said describes. Said has two other key descriptors for late style that apply to Smith’s Beachy Head: the first concerns “playfulness,” which Said elaborates as “the prolongation of effort, the disinterested and almost purely formal gesture [ . . . ] use[d] to elaborate, extend, embellish, and illustrate” the work’’ (139–40). In Said’s definition, playfulness does not denote our modern sense of pleasantry but something more serious and deconstructive. Second, Said argues that the work must engage in a veritable contest between varied absolutes, the “intersection of

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myth and reality, one turning upon and challenging the other” (142). As already noted, Smith’s Beachy Head definitely codifies these observations, enacting a playfulness that is a “prolongation of effort” on behalf of writer and reader, and deliberately setting the mythic and historical past against a far-too-violent present.

The 1807 Fables: A “Sylvan Room” In its inclusion of two shepherds’ songs, Beachy Head points toward the genre of beast fable and offers its readers a semiotics for dealing with the upcoming fables. In the second inset shepherd’s song,9 Smith sets up a woodland scene with animals amid “An elm, uprooted by the storm” that is being reclaimed by nature through “mosses gray and green” (583–84). The shepherd refers to this as constructing “for us a rustic form” from which we can ponder (585). Reflecting on the animals and what they have given us, the shepherd expresses in his song the following: The Squirrel in his frolic mood, Will fearless bound among the boughs; Yaffils laugh loudly thro’ the wood, And murmuring ring-doves tell their vows; While we, as sweetest woodscents rise Listen to woodland melodies. And I’ll contrive a sylvan room Against the time of summer heat, Where leaves, interwoven in Nature’s loom, Shall canopy our green retreat; And gales that “close the eye of day” Shall linger, e’er they die away. (608–18)

Smith describes here, through the shepherd’s song, a “sylvan room” that becomes a retreat against the tempests that assault the groves. The shepherd further describes this retreat as a “securer shelter” where “the forest hermit’s lonely cave / None but such soothing sounds shall reach” (624–32). When Smith returns to her regular metrical arrangement, she responds to the shepherd’s second song in the narrator’s voice, maintaining that “The visionary, nursing dreams like these, / Is not indeed unhappy” when compared to a resident of the times in which she and her readers live (655–56). The fables that Smith includes in the second section of her 1807 volume enact this kind of retreat alongside the pounding surf of Beachy Head. While we do not know what state this posthumous

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volume of Smith’s work was found in, we can be fairly certain that these fables and Beachy Head and the few other poems were in nearcomplete form, for she had been working on this volume for a time in 1805–6.10 The genre of fable itself may seem an odd turn; Smith had used them before in her children’s books, but to include them in a volume for an adult audience needs some clarification. In discussion of the fable, R. Howard Bloch in his essay “The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation” concludes that the genre of beast fable is particularly relevant to times of national-identity shaping. Bloch reflects that “the fable tends to appear at crucial moments in the development of cities and courts, moments also associated with state formation in the West” (Bloch 69). When a nation’s self-reckoning is reshaped by outside forces, such as the threat of invasion, the fable also can come as the genre of choice to reestablish stability. Smith knew well the context and uses of the fable when she chose to include that genre in this final volume. The fable had been lauded by Locke as a great teaching tool for young readers.11 Samuel Richardson, the printer/novelist, published an annotated version of Aesop’s Fables (1744); and Thomas and John Bewick’s The Select Fables of Aesop and Others (1784) is still noted as a milestone in children’s book illustration.12 Despite Rousseau’s objections to the fable—particularly those of La Fontaine—in his Emile (1762),13 the genre arrives in Smith’s time as a recommended genre for moral instruction. Smith makes a case for this very aspect in her fragmentary introduction to her five fables (entitled “Notes to the Fables” in the Stuart Curran edition). There, she asserts the authority of fable form in combination with the natural sciences to rearrange available empirical evidence into a knowable certainty. Smith posits in her “Notes” her own authority to write fables, maintaining that beast fables are not to be seen as a minor or trivial genre; for La Fontaine, Chaucer, Dryden, and most recently, Prior and Cowper “and so many other of the most eminent writers have not disdained” to write in this mode (251). After establishing the genre as worthy of notice, Smith then presents her own contribution to beast fable-writing. She closely associates beast fables with the real, observable lives of the beast they portend to represent. Smith’s specificity in the “Notes” in reference to James Grahame’s The Birds of Scotland, with Other Poems (1806) makes this point most eloquently. It operates as a dual gesture, both protecting her from the charge of plagiarism and linking her fables with legitimate natural history in connection with a professional, male natural historian (“Notes” 252). Thus, poetry and natural history become for Smith, as Landry notes, a way to

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make “ethical statements and social comment” (489). Smith’s melding of scientific accuracy with the genre of fable is innovative. In the “Notes,” Smith connects the beast fable with aesthetic theory both picturesque and sublime. Donna Landry argues that a “synaptic circuit [ . . . ] with which we are much more likely to be familiar today, between scientific and social ecology, a pictorial aesthetics derived from picturesque theory and a liking for pedestrian perambulation in the countryside” is created in Beachy, Head (Landry 489). This circuit continues in the fables in a slightly revised, slightly safer form. If the land itself—in particular, her favored country around Dover—is threatened by French invasion, then perambulation on the beach and hills facing France is also not particularly safe. Smith recognizes that what she needs is the “sylvan room,” safe and tucked away, that she alludes to in the second shepherd’s song of Beachy Head, and she uses the fable form as a way of achieving this end. What I am arguing about the fables parallels the kind of exteriorization that Adele Pinch claims Smith creates in her Elegiac Sonnets. Pinch writes that Smith externalizes her own feelings in order to create the image of the sentimental woman poet. “Feeling itself,” Pinch opines, “is thus revealed as that which constructs and mediates between the categories of literary ‘convention’ and personal ‘experience’ ” (Pinch 8).14 This kind of exteriorization shapes the personal into the literary, the moral, and (at least in the case of Beachy Head) the prophetic. While all of the fables combine these multiple elements, the one that most clearly embodies all that Smith brings to the genre is “The Dictatorial Owl.” Writing on birds serves a special function within Romantic women writers’ opuses. Paula R. Feldman tells us that birds signify for Romantic women the “perfect metaphor to explore the conflicting desires for freedom and for safety. [ . . . ] In these poems [ . . . ], women debate within and among themselves the virtues of domesticity measured against the excitement of liberty and its attendant dangers” (Feldman xxviii–xxix).15 The first of the five fables, “The Dictatorial Owl” concerns Strixaline, an owl who has made her home and now turns her attention to the miscarrying of the world around her. The name Strixaline is related to the classification of the nightshade, a poisonous plant and the source of strychnine. Smith references this plant, punning on Strixaline’s eyes, which she describes as “black and round, / Like berries that on deadly nightshade grow” (5–6). Although the term strychnine was not in scientific use according to the Oxford English Dictionary until 1819, Smith could have derived the idea from the Linnean classification of the plant nightshade,

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which was called in Latin strychnos and in its original Greek ρύχυσϛ. Strixaline in the fable does spread a type of verbal poison, similar to the nightshade from which she is named and to which she is compared. Strixaline’s insights are depressingly cynical, against the nature of joyfulness itself; her speech carries with it full, prophetic warnings to the world beyond her nest. She has followers in the daw, the magpie, and the crow. The central argument she makes to them is that the proper response to the world as it is “should be [ . . . ] [a] grave demeanour” and no “rejoicing in the new-born spring” should be heard (29–30). She particularly focuses her attention on marriages that seem doomed to fail. Smith writes that Strixaline strongly enjoyed telling the stories of doomed young lovers and their children: How some poor chough by sad chance was shent; Or [ . . . ] some orphan cuckoo left alone [Strixaline] would declaim; and then with loud lament, To do them good, she’d their disasters tell [ . . . ] (32–35)

The issue that Smith raises in this description of Strixaline concerns the almost sadistic pleasure that this owl gets from relating others’ stories of woe. Her notion of doing “good” by telling of people’s mistakes and catastrophes shows far too much interest and investment in trying to dictate the affairs of others, especially in their own domiciles. Like Mrs. Crewkherne in Smith’s The Young Philosopher (1797), who assumes power by preying on the weakness of and manipulating other women, Strixaline focuses her vehemence at those who are younger and female with the notion that she is doing them “good.” Smith continues this description of Strixaline’s desire to capitalize on the errors of other women. Strixaline [ . . . ] much deplore[d] the faults they had committed: Yet “hop’d, poor creatures! they might still do well.” And sighing, she would say, how much she pitied Birds, who, improvident resolv’d to wed, Which in such times as these to certain ruin led! (36–40)

Smith does not specify what about “the times” has Strixaline so convinced that marriages are sentenced to doom. However, Smith may be alluding to the situation of her daughter Lucy and her husband, Thomas Newhouse, who were having financial problems and were, with their children, living off Smith’s meager income.

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Thus, Strixaline’s dilemma is not far from Smith’s own, nor is her position as prophetic spokesperson to an age run amuck that dissimilar to that of the writer of ballads such as The Forest Boy. The difference comes in the arena of Strixaline’s action and her pride. Strixaline’s arena is the domestic space of others, not really the larger social issues facing the forest. More dangerously, Strixaline allows herself to become proud and boastful as a result of a group of sycophants with which she surrounds herself. When Strixaline grows old, we are told that the crow and the raven convinced her that “no head was ever twixt two wings / So wise as hers”—that indeed she was as wise as “the pope [ . . . ] Ycleped Joan” (48–50). Her pride is “so rais’d” (51) that she believes she knows all there is to know, including the world of science, and that no one is her equal in wisdom and the giving of wise counsel. However, pride goeth before the fall, as the proverb says: Strixaline grows so proud that she comes out in the daytime, leaving the owl’s proper sphere of nighttime, and starts preaching to the birds of the day in the open sunlight. She exhorts them to be bleak and thoughtful instead of singing “joyous note[s]” (81). The daytime birds unanimously mob her and then with the community’s consent exile Strixaline back to her elm where she remains alone. We are not told when or if her followers return. Strixaline is “severely mortified” as she flees to her enforced retirement. Smith opines that Strixaline reckoned That wisdom such as hers included pow’r, Nor did experience teach her to reflect How very ill some folks apply their labours, Who think themselves much wiser than their neighbors. (107–10)

In an interesting inversion of the power/knowledge nexus that Foucault expounds, knowledge does not lead to power in Strixaline’s case; rather, power and knowledge are separate spheres and, at least for the female busybody, power is not sustainable beyond her own, proper sphere. Strixaline’s story’s lesson is as much about proper use of power and effort as it is about women’s spheres. Strixaline does little to help the community; rather, she sits on high with her friends and judges harshly what is going on there. Her efforts to improve the lives of the birds around her are unproductive and, at their heart, exploitive. Smith’s lesson seems to be one of resignation and “pitching in” to make the world a better place. Curran’s earlier notion of an alternative romanticism that recognizes the “obesity” of the natural world and

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seeks to live in the knowledge of that difference is certainly implied in the outcome of Strixaline’s story. Smith’s usage of the owl as a figure of satire for matriarchal tendencies16 is unique. In many fables, the owl does represent a figure of untoward pride. For instance, in Alexis Piron’s fable “Le Roitlet” (1776), he describes the owl as the embodiment of “les airs insolens” (13). This description comes from a fable that presents the lesson that “Le mérite est exclus sans cesse” (trans. Shapiro 39).17 Where Smith offers uniqueness is in making the owl a model for female misunderstanding and pride, attempting as Strixaline does to stage her own victories over those who are also powerless in patriarchal society. Furthermore, “The Dictatorial Owl” is unique in the annals of the beast fable for its subtle self-reflexivity, an attribute not associated with the classic works in the genre. Smith herself has taken the morally prideful ground that Strixaline assumes in the tale, acting as a modern-day prophet/doomsayer. For example, in the most famous section of Beachy Head, where Smith memorializes her own contribution to Romanticism,18 Smith makes the point that she came before the other poets of her age and she then in part builds on this established authority. Strixaline is building on age and wisdom as well; her forced retreat back into the domestic bower (and out of civic life altogether) seems acceptable to Smith as repercussion for stepping out of the owl’s assigned role. Given that Smith herself has acted as a doomsayer in Beachy Head in ways that resemble Strixaline’s own message of despair, it seems odd (and perhaps misogynist) to applaud Strixaline’s banishment. However, by defining through the fable unacceptable female presumption, Smith takes on authority herself to arbitrate what can and cannot be said by women in the public sphere. Thus, her gesture in “The Dictatorial Owl” is both self-protective (by taking the power to define female méconnaissance away from patriarchy) and self-assertive (in the very act of the representation and delineation of women in power themselves). The next beast fable in Smith’s collection, “The Jay in Masquerade,” is another study in pride run rampant. Again, the lesson is seemingly to learn one’s place within the natural order and to willingly stay within it. The jay as a youngster believes he is the most beautiful bird ever born until he meets up with a peacock in the woods. He is left speechless by the peacock’s “shafts, so webb’d, and painted so, / That they seem’d stolen from Cupid’s wing [ . . . ]” (53–54). The jay then realizes that the peacock will on occasion shed some of his feathers. In a desire to emulate the beauty of the peacock, the jay begins scrounging these fallen feathers and placing them in his own pelt.

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Full of pride, he shows this newly decorated self to the surrounding birds, who then ridicule him for his borrowed glories. Smith writes of their reactions that they [ . . . ] while they gazed at him, were heard To join in ridicule together, Gibing and taunting, as they press Around, and mock his senseless trouble, While some pluck off his borrow’d dress, Geese hiss, ducks quack, and turkies gobble. (81–8)

The jay is mortified by his plumage being exposed as fake. Like Strixaline earlier, the masquerading jay must learn either to live as it was given him to live, or to live apart from society as a pointless, unimportant, forgotten exile. Smith becomes her most tendentious in this fable when she turns to her moral. Her moral in “The Dictatorial Owl” is worked into the narrative voice rather elegantly. Here, in “The Masquerading Jay,” it stands emphatically apart on the page and from the narrative. Smith opines at the end of this fable that the lesson we learn from the jay’s pilfering and masquerading is to Be what you are, nor try in vain, To reach what nature will deny, Factitious Art can ne’er attain The grace of young Simplicity. (93–96)

The first part of Smith’s moral especially speaks to the older person who tries to retain youth through falsity—false hair, false makeup and plumage, even false attitudes. Being who and what you are—and inhabiting that identity—is one of the key points Smith makes in the fables, both socially in the case of Strixaline and physically and psychologically in the case of the jay. But Smith is not done moralizing just yet. She continues her teaching, offering the following in the final stanza of “The jay in masquerade”: And ye, whose transient fame arises From that which others write or say, Learn hence, how common sense despises The pilf’ring literary jay. (97–100)

This second half of the moral is almost a return to the beginning of Smith’s novelistic career; she had been accused of plagiarism in

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relation to her earliest works. Further, Pinch points out that this strategy of the quoting of others’ words is a key to sensibility poetry and Smith’s own revival of the sonnet.19 So why does Smith raise the notion of literary “pilfering”? This is not the only allusion to “pilfering”—or plagiarism—in relation to the jay in her collection of fables. As I have mentioned, in her “Notes,” Smith gestures protectively toward James Grahame’s volume of poetry to say that she did not borrow from it. As she writes in reference to “The Lark’s Nest,” “[t]here is nothing I am more desirous of avoiding, even in a trifle like this, than the charge of plagiarism” (251). However, despite Smith’s claims to the contrary, the theme of plagiarism in relation to the pilfering jay is borrowed directly from La Fontaine. La Fontaine’s fable is, however, much shorter, and focuses on the jay that is ridiculed by both his own kind and the peacocks he tries to emulate. Smith does not mention the peacocks’ derision at the jay’s borrowing of their plumage. Neither does Smith tongue-incheek reject plagiarism as a concern beyond that of the fabulist, as La Fontaine does.20 The references to “pilfering” in relation to the jay point toward a larger lesson about the nature of literary ambition and not striving for more than a writer can achieve. It also shows the emerging importance or originality in the Romantic era. Finally, it expresses the hope that what is original will survive the test of time and not merely remain “transient,” as the jay’s plumage is. For feminist readers, both “The Jay in Masquerade” and “The Dictatorial Owl” can appear as controversial texts, advocating women staying in their place and resigning civic power and influence altogether. These poems could seem to fit within the same antifeminist vein as the anti-Jacobin novels of writers such as Elizabeth Hamilton. 21 However, although Smith is retrenching somewhat from her earlier position in Beachy Head, especially in regard to epistemology and the knowable, she is not undoing her earlier Wollstonecraftian feminist advocacy. Her hermeneutic in the fables is more complex than polemic: note that the jay is male; this fable can thus as easily be read as a subversive piece directed at male vanity and male literary pilfering. “The Dictatorial Owl” also seems to me not so much antifeminist as realist (though cynical) about its feminism. Smith’s care in the “Notes” to locate the fables in relation to natural, scientific accuracy reinforces this realism. The fables are about teaching her readers—especially her female readers—how to negotiate successfully life as it really is, not how it ought to be. Thus, although she offers her moral rather tendentiously in the case of “The Masquerading Jay,” Smith begins to construct herself as a

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sage, speaking from her lofty perch of experience to others willing to listen.

Conclusion: The Fables as “Sylvan Room” Smith’s final fable, “The Swallow,” returns once more to the style (metrically as well as epistemologically) of the second shepherd’s song in Beachy Head. This final poem apostrophizes to the swallow that As fables tell, an Indian Sage, The Hindostani woods among, Could in his desert hermitage, As if ‘twere mark’d in written page, Translate the wild bird’s song. I wish I did his power possess.” (16–21)

In this final fable the persona rejects fabling as a possibility, though she longs for its simplicity. Smith gestures here both to the sylvan room as well as the hermit in his quietude from Beachy Head. She simultaneously reaches out for something mystical, non-European, and perhaps nonrational in the references to the Hindu sage. It is in this fable that Smith’s notion of creating a sylvan room through the fable form comes most fully to the fore. In “The Swallow,” Smith celebrates a return to nature—indeed, a new type of nature mysticism that responds more deeply to aging and the mystery of death than the Wordsworthian sublime, which is linked so closely with youthfulness. This fable reaches for a non-Western version of spiritual epistemology as an answer to the impending catastrophe of the times, a new understanding of nature and its relation to the aging self. The final two stanzas of this fable bring home Smith’s point most eloquently: How learn ye, while the cold waves boom Your deep and ouzy couch above, The time when flowers of promise bloom, And call you from your transient tomb, To light, and life, and love? Alas! how little can be known, Her sacred veil where Nature draws; Let baffled Science humbly own, Her mysteries understood alone By Him who gives her laws. (61–70)

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While some might call this passage a retreat into religious consolation, I think that Smith is doing something more profound here—exploring the nature of what a moderately existential style of acceptance looks like. Smith suggests here that there is not certainty except in that someone, somewhere above the human realm has it. She also suggests that our best methods of achieving some sort of authority over nature are vain, an argument that she made as well in relation to science in Beachy Head. Here, however, at the end of “The Swallow’s Nest,” there is not even the consolation of being an early innovator in nature-worship, as she describes herself in Beachy Head. We are left here with the retreating swallow, in penury, in her nest, embracing indeterminacy as she watches the sea roll in. In his study, Said reflects that “Late style is in, but oddly apart from the present” (24). There are many ways in which Beachy Head is very much of its time: its focus on the threat of invasion, its sense of Smith’s reading of the texts and ideas alive in the early nineteenth century, and even Smith’s own placement of herself as one of the key innovators of Romantic thought before it came into vogue. The fables move from this point outward, into something that sets them above and beyond the contingencies of the present moment. While they reflect profoundly on problems of pride and the role of the female prophet in her own age, they also stand apart; like the second shepherd’s song in Beachy Head, they create a sylvan room that exists above the ebb and flow of the end of an age and of a life.

Notes 1. Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),1: 613. All future reference to this volume will be given as line numbers (for poems) and page numbers (for prose works). 2. See in particular Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000). 3. See chapter five of Anne Kelley, Catherine Trotter: Early Modern Writers in the Vanguard of Feminism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2002). 4. It is interesting to note that neither Labbe nor Fletcher deals directly with the fables in their monographs on Smith. 5. Even in the new foreword written these twenty-seven years later, Hartman does not address the glaring exclusion of women from his formulations for Romanticism.

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Mark K. Fulk 6. The personal turmoil that Smith was experiencing is well recorded in the advertisement to the Beachy Head volume, written by a friend after her death (and included in the edition of the poems cited earlier). In this advertisement, the writer makes the point that Smith’s plans for Beachy Head remained incomplete because, all through the writing of this volume, Smith was experiencing “increasing debility” (215). Judith Stanton reflects on these latter days of Smith’s life and career, remarking that Smith’s condition of “untreatable uterine or ovarian cancer confers on its victims a painful demise even now; yet the letters of Smith’s last year show her composing new poems, sharing a jest with her remaining loyal friend, Sarah Rose, and still fighting for her family’s rights” (The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith [Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003], 760). Cf. Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (New York: Palgrave, 2001), chapter seven. 7. Said uses Little Jude/Father Time from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as his quintessential model of a figure that embodies late style in his “premature senescence” (On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain [New York: Vintage Books, 2006], 136). 8. This observation is made in reference to Euripides’s The Bacchae. 9. These two songs are, respectively, ll. 531–55 and ll. 577–654 of Beachy Head. Critics of the poem itself have barely noted these inset pieces. 10. Indeed, in Stuart Curran’s notes to this volume, he writes that the fables “The Dictatorial Owl” and “The Jay in Masquerade” “were overlooked or simply omitted when the Beachy Head collection was first published” (321). Clearly, Smith was working on these fables simultaneously with Beachy Head. Whether or not they were originally published in the collection, it still seems certain to me that the fables as conceived were in response to Beachy Head. 11. See the discussion of Locke’s views from his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1910) and his recommendation of Aesop’s Fables in Donna E. Norton, Through the Eyes of a Child: An Introduction to Children’s Literature, 7th ed. (Columbus, OH: Pearson, 2007), 49. 12. For more discussion of these and related titles, see John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children’s Literature (New York: Lippcott, 1975). 13. See Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Emile (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 97–102. This volume is widely referenced in Smith’s other works and was readily available in both translated and French editions during Smith’s time. 14. Cf. Chapter two. 15. Feldman does not include “The Dictatorial Owl” in her list of poems about birds by Romantic women writers. 16. For a definition of matriarchy, see my forthcoming article on The Young Philosopher.

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17. “True merit knows no victories.” 18. I am speaking of lines 346–67, where she pointedly describes herself as “An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine,” in contradistinction to Wordsworth who became the popular poet of the age after her earlier model of nature veneration. This famous section of Beachy Head has often been anthologized apart from the longer version of the poem. 19. See especially pp. 60–62 of Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 8. 20. The idea of a pilfering jay occurs much earlier than La Fontaine. Aesop seems to have been the first, although Smith’s version of the tale is more indebted to La Fontaine.” 9. p. 103. The sentence should read: “A great deal has been made of individual moral judgment as it was found in the contemporary Evangelical movement within Anglican Episcopalism (Lodge, “Vocabulary” 275–82; Roberts 142–54; Brooke 126–32). 21. See M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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Chapter 6

“A Be t t e r Gu i de i n O u r se lv es”: Obj ec t s, Rom a n t ic-P ro t esta n t Et h ic s, a n d Fa n n y P r ic e’s I n di v i dua l ism Rodney Farns wor th

Fanny Price sets postmodernist teeth on edge.

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This is so much so that the makers of the recent film and television adaptations of Mansfield Park felt she needed to be transformed into a more outspoken young woman resembling—along with the author herself, as revealed in the extant letters—Elizabeth Bennett. I, therefore, will use the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice to prepare the ground for a re-presentation of Fanny Price.2 Elizabeth Bennett is offering a declaration of independence for groups bound by ties of outmoded collectivity when she says to Lady Catherine: “I am only resolved to act in that manner which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you or to any person so wholly unconnected with me” (Novels 2: 358). The me, the two mys, and the I rhetoric underscore a highly evolved form of individualism. It must be admitted of course that the final phrase hints that people bound to Elizabeth Bennett with close family connections might perilously qualify her self-reliance; however, when Elizabeth refuses Mr. Collins’s proposal against her mother’s wishes and against the future financial security of her sisters, the young woman shows that she ultimately is the mistress

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of her conscience and destiny, which take precedence over family considerations. Her father’s approval of her decision in the matter comes later, and although comforting, it had nothing to do with her adamantine resolve. Seen in whatever light, Elizabeth’s proclamation remains an announcement of an approach to human consciousness that most members of the collectivist medieval world—had they heard something like it—would have regarded as solipsistic in the extreme. The early modern era falls into stages of moving away from medieval fonts of collectivity—which include guild, church, class, clan, and other bonds that socially order humans.3 In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber sees in the interaction of capitalism and Protestantism the beginnings of individualism (104–10, 222, n. 22). Weber’s work, of course, has been qualified by subsequent scholarship. Weber, for example, gives Calvinism—at the expense of other early forms of Protestantism—too great an emphasis. Further, we now realize that the Italian Renaissance made its own contributions to the early beginnings of modern individualism. Qualifications aside, Weber still appears correct in giving decided emphasis to the contributions the Reformation gave to the growth of Individualism, which in turn went hand in hand with the growth of Capitalism. Allowed to read the Bible in vernacular versions made accessible by the printing press, the Protestant was able to assert an individualism inconceivable in the medieval North and only glimpsed by a tiny elite in Renaissance Italy. The Bible and the lone reader led to a total transformation of conscience. Luther’s translation of the Bible was the opening cannonade in a revolution. And it is no accident that the first martyr of the English-Protestant tradition was William Tyndale, who was burnt at the stake primarily for translating the Bible into English.4 He went to a Catholic pyre on the Continent in the same year Thomas Cromwell’s first “Injunction” mandated an English Bible in every church. This new relationship between the layperson and the Bible repositioned that same layperson’s conscience vis-á-vis God. Perhaps equally significant as the vernacular Bible in freeing the individual conscience and loosing it from bonds of a religious establishment was the Lutheran and Anglican abandonment of auricular confessions, as an institutionalized practice. Each individual had the burden of making her or his peace with God. Heretofore, the locus of conscience had centered on the collective entity that was the medieval church. By at least the mid-sixteenth century, for the Protestant, the locus of conscience had begun a massive shift into the self—a

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process that slowly worked itself out over the course of the entire early modern era. Looking at this growing individualism from a literary point of view, Watt has based his convictions on just such an historical foundation: “By its insistence on the individual’s responsibility for his or her own salvation, and by its fervent simplification of so many of the existing doctrinal and institutional traditions of Rome, Protestantism in effect vastly increased the general tendency of Christianity to ground the religious life on the quest of each individual soul” (25). It is, however, not Elizabeth Bennett but Fanny Price who offers the fullest perspective of this quest of each individual soul—a quest which created and continues to drive the myths of modern individualism. Admittedly, the argument has been made that there is a substantial difference between strong-willed Elizabeth and seemingly pliable Fanny; nevertheless, it is a central point of my argument that both protagonists, in their idiosyncratic ways, embody at base the same Austenian individualism. Underneath Fanny’s malleable exterior lies a bedrock of self-validating ethics, which Austen—as I seek to prove—believes are divinely inspired. In short, I hope to demonstrate that Austen finds the motive force of Fanny Price’s individualism in the soul’s unmediated connection to Providence, as it was conceived in the more radical forms of Protestantism.5 I find, too, that in this novel, as in the three others published during her lifetime, Austen has used the threevolume structure much like playwrights used the acts structure in the drama of the day. Through all of Volume One, with a transition in the second, Austen shows Fanny’s personality to be a material creation of her economic nothingness. Fanny comes to Mansfield Park as a financial zero—a poor relation. Superficially viewed, she seems, especially to most twenty-first-century readers, a human naught. Seemingly created entirely by her economic situation, she is like the protagonists of the Gothic novels of the 1790s—novels that were permeated with “the tenors of economics,” as Copeland puts it (35). He further observes that “women writers of the 1790s look about their capaciously money-oriented society to find their worst nightmare realized, that theirs was indeed a society in which a woman without access to cash might have no place at all” (37). According to Kelley, “English Jacobin novelists followed the ‘necessitarian’ or determinist theories of Enlightenment materialist philosophers, and so use plot to illustrate how a particular political regime conditions social practice, thereby determining individual character and necessitating certain kinds of action, usually for the worse” (162). There is much, indeed, to be said for Fanny being

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an exemplar of the environmentally mauled individual often found in the Jacobin novels of the 1790s—so richly written about by Butler (Jane Austen and the War of Ideas 29–157). Even with these forerunners in mind, the extent to which Austen based the psychology of Fanny Price on economic grounds is breathtakingly radical. She is in essential ways a proto-Marxian character. Socioeconomics have been used to browbeat her innate timidity into abject submission. Her Aunt Norris carefully and ceaselessly has impressed upon Fanny her socioeconomic position from the moment of her arrival at Mansfield. Mrs. Norris’s eight years of brainwashing Fanny can be summed up by just one of her remarks to the young woman: “[Y]ou must be the lowest and the last” (Novels 3: 221 [258]).6 One cannot help but think that the only reason Aunt Norris worked so hard in bringing Fanny to Mansfield Park was selfishly and even cruelly motivated.7 With Fanny around, Norris could escape being the poorest relation and have someone even lower on the pecking order. Objects are used throughout Volume One to humiliate and keep Fanny in the place that Norris and all else, except for Edmund, have conceived for her.8 A map puzzle, watercolors, and crayons become a way that Julia and Maria put their poor relation down: “Dear Mamma, only think, my cousin cannot put a map of Europe together [ . . . ]—or she does not know the difference between watercolours and crayons!—How strange!—Did you ever hear any thing so stupid?” (3: 18 [20]). Fanny is made to fetch things and do light but menial tasks for Lady Bertram. Edmund, usually so punctilious on this point, has been distracted by Mary Crawford. Her superficial seeming Elizabeth-Bennett-like wit is a distraction in which the reader is often—by a telling arrangement of the author—complicit; it is as if Austen is setting an ethical trap for the reader to choose between Fanny Price and Mary Crawford.9 I cannot help imagining the author’s sardonic smile at contemplating her readers wanting to find in Mary Crawford, upon her first witty retort, another Elizabeth Bennett, and getting a female George Wickham. Mary has had the use of the horse that Edmund had set aside for Fanny’s exercise and escape from serfdom: “she had been left four days together without any choice of companions or exercise, and without any excuse for avoiding whatever her unreasonable aunts might require” (74 [87]). The upshot has been that Fanny has been overcome by the heat while picking roses at the behest of Lady Bertram, and the young woman, weakened by a headache, has stolen a moment’s rest on the sofa. Mrs. Norris launches one of her sharpest attacks crammed with the objects of Fanny’s oppression: “That is a very foolish trick, Fanny,

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to be idling away all the evening upon a sofa. Why cannot you come and sit here, and employ yourself as we do?—If you have no work of your own, I can supply you from the poor-basket.” Austen’s irony, here, is unrelenting: first, the idea that Fanny is without work is preposterous. Second, the poor relation is to be given work from a basket for work being done for church charity: “There is all the new calico that was bought last week, not touched yet. I am sure I almost broke my back by cutting it out. You should learn to think of other people; and take my word for it, it is a shocking trick for a young person to be always lolling upon a sofa.” Again, there is this return to the sofa: a place of hallowed significance in the parlors of the time—it seems to have been reserved for the highest in the pecking order. The accusation is so outrageously beyond the pale that even cousin Julia intervenes, “I must say, ma’am, that Fanny is as little upon the sofa as any body in the house” (71 [83–4]). When Lady Bertram describes the reason for Fanny’s discomfort her real focus is upon her own comfort: “ ‘Yes, indeed, Edmund,’ added her ladyship, who had been thoroughly awakened by Mrs. Norris’s sharp reprimand to Fanny; ‘I was out above an hour. I sat three quarters of an hour in the flower garden, while Fanny cut the roses, and very pleasant it was I assure you, but very hot.’ ” Scattered among all her solipsistic perceptions is Fanny’s cutting the roses in the hot sun, which is reduced to a relative gage of time passing. The “I”s continue to dominate: “It was shady enough in the alcove, but I declare I quite dreaded the coming home again.” Edmund tried to bring the subject around to the invalid: “Fanny has been cutting roses, has she?” In the solipsistic consciousness of Lady Bertram, the dim image of poor Fanny appears lost amid roses. “Yes, and I am afraid they will be the last this year. Poor thing! She found it hot enough, but they were so full blown, that one could not wait” (72 [84]). Thusly, her ladyship’s comfort becomes a matter of the comfort, as it were, of the roses, and both overwhelm any consideration for the comfort of Fanny. Mrs. Norris softens enough to offer, not her own, but Lady Bertram’s smelling salts, which brings forth the information that Fanny has been sent out across the sunny lawn twice—beyond all doubt, to fetch things from Mrs. Norris’s house. Many toughened by living through the cusp of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries do not want to see this product of an underprivileged environment—to experience the tremblings and tenors of a person enslaved by financial gratitude10 —to have to read of a woman so brought to heel before a triumphant patriarchy. Just like the proponents of Soviet Socialist Realism, many do not want to see

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the working out of the full Marxian implications of economic environment acing on a human psyche. Many want Fanny to rise up like the Regency-woman equivalent of some brawny, bare-chested, Soviet proletarian hero—a creation not of radical Marxism but rather of reactionary Stalinism; Austen’s proto-Socialist-Realist exemplar somehow, in ways not posited in Das Kapital, transcends the oppressive environment of an impoverished childhood. But for one tremendous defining moment that cancels out the rest of her behavior Fanny remains in large part the product of her materialist environment. If the makers of the recent film and television adaptations of Mansfield Park sought to radicalize the novelist’s conception of Fanny by making her less downtrodden and more outspoken, they failed: if considered as a creature of her economic circumstances, Austen’s original creation is far more radical in terms of critiquing social and economic conditioning. To stop here and to view Fanny as solely proto-Marxian in conception is certainly not my intention: as I see it, in her moment of glorious immovability against family members who would pressure her into a loveless marriage with the marginally moral Henry Crawford, she is completely the Protestant individual standing alone in the face of feudal collectivism. Fanny Price’s adventure is what Kelley terms the “Anglican romance” or a “romance journey in which an omniscient yet benevolent deity presides” (165–67). In Fanny’s romance, those qualities that Sir Thomas contemplates in the last chapter of the novel play their part: “Something must have been wanting within” which would have been “an active principle” mediating “self-denial and humility” (463 [535–6]). Notice, however, that it is not adversity and poverty that are the motive moral-creating force. Austen is not some St. Francis enamored with poverty: for her, poverty is a morally indifferent force that can create a coveting Betsey, a sullen Rebecca, or a fretful Mrs. Price, just as much as wealth can produce the inmates of Mansfield Park or, at its best, an Edmund—and, in small part, a Fanny. The moral difference in these individuals comes from another source beyond income and the objects it buys. The real crucial moment that conveys just how beaten down Fanny is comes after her long and adamant resistance to the staging of Lovers’ Vows. Her horror at the immorality of the play is not impregnable, probably because it is not untainted with her own selfish consideration—her shyness. She cannot hold out to persuasion: “as they all persevered—as Edmund repeated his wish, and with a look of even fond dependence on her good nature, she must yield. She would do her best” (172). Coming at the end of Volume One,

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this incident culminates Austen’s presentation of the “Jacobin” or “Proto-Marxian” Fanny. Material explanations will begin to be insufficient to explain Fanny in Volume Two and completely fail, at the beginning of Volume Three. At the crucial moment of being nearly overborne by Mr. Crawford’s proposal and Sir Thomas’s11 and even Edmund’s pressure for her to accept it, she finds—from apparently nowhere, materialistically speaking—the inner strength to resist the proposal. Fanny’s objection to Mr. Crawford is his bad “principles.” “Her ill opinion of him was founded chiefly on observations” (317 [366]). Her love for Edmund is a serious and—I would add one in keeping with Crammer’s wedding service in The Book of Common Prayer—a religious factor for her refusal of Crawford; after all for Fanny, there could be no love, no honoring, no obeying him. She is convinced that Sir Thomas will come to see the matter as she does, which to her mind is “as a good man must feel, how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless and how wicked it was, to marry without affection” (324 [374]). Phrases such as “good man,” “unpardonable,” and “wicked” with their virtue/sin dichotomy are not gratuitous Christian wordings on the part of Austen’s narrator. Critics and, here it might be added also, filmmakers12 who want to conjecture that Fanny, even for a moment, might give in to Mr. Crawford should reread Crammer’s wedding service, which reiterates the point that Anglican marriage must be based on love, and they also should remember the ringing line from Austen’s November 18, 1814 letter: “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection” (Letters 280). Anything includes the squalor of Portsmouth. The narrator says of Fanny: “Had her own affection been as free—as perhaps they ought to have been—he [Crawford] never could have engaged them” (Novels 3: 329 [379]). A passage in the last chapter, with its highly conditional “could he” and “would he” (467 [540]), makes it clear that Henry Crawford could succeed with Fanny only if he were not Henry Crawford. In her great feat of individualism, against all previous environmental conditioning, Fanny is holding out for a marriage with affection. I also attempted to build upon the idea of the novel as Austen’s “grounds of being” (Duckworth 35). Fanny’s refusal, which Tave terms “her most important single act” (158), is the central act in the core of Austen’s entire works. I propose that Austen herself saw the source of Fanny’s inner strength, her individualism, as coming from something like what Quakers termed an “inner light.” While orthodox Anglicans might have rejected this dissent phraseology and its implicit qualification

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of pastoral care, many of them during Austen’s time felt that within each individual was found the potential for proper moral judgment. Fanny’s stance derives from a radical Protestant brand of individualism: the key to the author’s Anglicanism. I contend, then, that Fanny—who is, up until that time, a perfect Jacobin, proto-Marxian product of her material environment—is illuminated by an “inner light” Her unprecedented act is a miracle. Austen offers for it no materialistic motivation. The term is associated most often with Quakers, but really should not be limited to them. The concept of an inner source of communication with Providence goes deeply into earliest decades of Protestantism. The Spiritualists of the 1520s and 1530s wrote of it, not only as the “inner light” but also as the “inner Word” or the “internal Word” (Dickens, Reformation and Society 143–50). Other groups had taken it up by Austen’s time. Indeed, this is one among many indications that the time had come for their radical Protestantism during the Romantic period. The Quakers and their concepts of religious individualism were very much a part of the general climate of opinion within Romanticism, which might not have left Jane Austen untouched. Knox-Shaw finds a close connection of Austen’s vision of Fanny and the paradigmatic Quaker of Thomas Clarkson’s Portraiture of Quakerism (1807); except for the key question of slavery, Knox-Shaw tends to emphasize the negative or prohibitive side of the parallel over the positive and, I dare say, the metaphysical side of the “inner voice” (178). And the Evangelicals, working closely with the Quakers on ending the slave trade, may well have been influenced by their metaphysical side—specifically, by their moral epistemology. As for Austen and the Evangelicals, scholars are divided.13 Austen’s contradictory statements on Evangelicals in her letters—pro and contra—show an ambivalence that would have opened her own mind to thought rather than have closed it. In 1809, she writes very emphatically, “I do not like the Evangelicals” (Letters 170). Opinions can of course modify with time, and Halperin—writing with as great a command of Austen documents as any—detects what he sees as “Jane Austen’s growing evangelicalism during her last years” (306). Tuite sees, at least, a “fairly mild Evangelical enthusiasm that touched Austen at the time of writing Mansfield Park” (215). By 1814, the year that Mansfield Park was published, Austen has materially changed her attitude at least away from absolute rejection: “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling must be happiest & safest” (Letters 280). Showing from beneath the

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qualifying negatives is a real sympathetic grappling with these ideas; this would have been more than enough for the absorbing parts of the Evangelicals’ system. Concerning the ideas, a historian of Anglican thought in the nineteenth century writes that Evangelicalism . . . helped . . . to foster a spirit of individualism in religion. . . . Religion was conceived as something almost entirely subjective, as a right relation of the individual soul to God which was to be brought about, not so much through the aid which the worship and system of an ordered society might provide, as through the free, interior action of the spirit of God upon the spirit of the individual. (Storr 67)

William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of Christianity is taken as the basic source by historians of Evangelicalism. Human institutions, even the church, are not enough: “the Christian’s hope is founded, not on the speculations or the strength of man, but on the declaration of Him who cannot die, or the power of the Omnipotence.” Using his reading of the ultimate Protestant authority, Wilberforce clearly shows how moral concepts are implanted in the individual’s consciousness: “We learn from the Scriptures that it is one main part of the operations of the Holy Spirit, to implant these heavenly principles in the human mind, and to cherish their growth. We are encouraged to believe that in answer to our prayers, this aid from above will give efficacy to our earnest endeavors” (Wilberforce 58). This exactly fits my reading of how Providence works from within the kingdom upon the conscience as conveyed by Austen in Mansfield Park and in her prayers. I think the radical-Protestant term “inner light” comes closer to capturing the essence of the epistemology of an individual conscience personified in Fanny Price. This concept is expressed by Fanny after Mr. Crawford asks her whether she is not going to tell him what he should do; she replies, “you know your duty” (341 [394]). The best example comes when Mr. Crawford says that her “judgment” is his “rule of right”—to which she replies: “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it” (412 [478]). Tanner uses the term “inner light” in discussing this phrase, but without contextualizing it (157). In his notes to the Cambridge Edition of Mansfield Park, Wiltshire suggests that Fanny speaks here in “Evangelical terms” and signifies their “inner light” (727, n. 4); however, he fails to add they took this term from the Quakers and before that the Spiritualists; the interesting point here is that Fanny’s theology derives from a powerful Protestant underground that had only recently flowed via Romantic

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Evangelicalism into the English Church. It is dicta such as these that refine those who seek to reduce Mansfield Park to a treatise on moral education—at least in terms of practical pedagogy.14 For Austen, ethics are not only an outward matter: secondary ethics come as duties from education by principles; the best come from within, from “the heart.” The narrator conveys this by means of Fanny’s thoughts about Mr. Crawford: Here was again a want of delicacy and regard for others which had formerly so struck and disgusted her. Here was again a something of the same Mr. Crawford whom she had so reprobated before. How evidently was there a gross want of feeling and humanity where his own pleasure was concerned—And, alas! how always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in. (my italics; 328–9 [379])

While the syntax is broken, perhaps to suggest patterns of emotiondriven thoughts, the meaning of the central sentence is clear enough about the hierarchy of internal and external moral education.15 Austen posits this epistemology of morals as a mystery to her and to Fanny, when the latter resets to her sister Susan’s incipient moral sense put to the test, in part, by contention with another sister over an object, a silver knife. Fanny’s greatest wonder on the subject soon became—not that Susan should have been provoked into disrespect and impatience against her better knowledge—but that so much better knowledge, so many good notions, should have been hers at all; and that, brought up in the midst of negligence and error, she should have formed such proper opinions of what ought to be—she, who had no cousin Edmund to direct her thoughts or fix her principles. (397–8 [460])

The reference to Edmund is surely ironic in intent since, in the moral hierarchy of Mansfield Park, he comes in a distant second to Fanny, who, like Susan, gained the knowledge from a better and a hidden source. Something like the Quaker “inner light” is suggested when Fanny admires in Susan “the natural light of the mind.” But the eighteenth-century Anglican appeal to reason is also directly mentioned here: “Susan was only acting on the same truths and pursuing the same system, which her [Fanny’s] own judgment acknowledged” (395 [458]). In the passages just quoted, one finds the essential stylistic ground base that ties the novel together, and its insistency of employment sets Mansfield Park off from the other five novels. In describing

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this peculiar style of Mansfield Park, Wiltshire takes a secularly psychological-aesthetic view when he writes that Austen demonstrates that “inner life can be represented as if it were a continuous inner speech” (Recreating Jane Austen 79). This is what Butler discussed as “free indirect speech” that “becomes the vehicle of the narrative, and the special quality” of Fanny’s “mind,” which in its turn “colours” and “dominates the story” (Butler, Jane Austen and War of Ideas 237). They both fail to realize that this inwardness of discourse in Mansfield Park is, as is seen earlier, a correlative to the inner voice or “light.” Since the inner light burns brightest in Fanny, so too does “inner speech.” It is the epistemological source of Fanny’s higher knowledge, as it is the source of the lesser thoughts of others within the novel. Jane Austen’s epistemology of morals posits that the best source of ethical knowledge comes from Providence working within the consciousness of the individual. Austen in her public voice as the novelist demonstrates a characteristically Anglican reticence on speaking too overtly on theology. One instance, however, where Providence directly named as working on the human consciousness is described, comes in Edmund’s rainy Sunday afternoon confession to Fanny and seems strangely vague in reference: “We were all disposed to wonder—but it seems to have been the merciful appointment of Providence that the heart which knew no guile, should not suffer” (455 [527]). Its context might signify that the observation refers to Mary Crawford or, perhaps more likely, to Fanny. This Providence is made even more particularly manifest in the three prayers ascribed to her (6: 453–57).16 They are dominated by rhetorical turns that picture God the Father or the Holy Ghost as a teacher: “teach us,” “quicken our sense,” “dispose our hearts,” or “Incline us to ask our hearts these questions oh! God.” Morality is the primary topic of instruction: “give us a stronger desire of resisting every evil inclination and weakening every habit of sin”; “may we by the assistance of thy holy spirit so conduct ourselves on earth as to secure an eternity of happiness with each other in thy heavenly kingdom.” A serious part of the pedagogy is the individual’s examination of his or her own conscience, but even here God is described as a motive force, with free will or agency being allowed for by the first word: “Incline us oh God! [ . . . ] to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct.” The inescapable implication that these are family prayers in the tradition of The Book of Common Prayer has little effect on the fact that the individual consciousness is the location of the epistemological wellspring from whence comes divine inspiration. The individual’s consciousness is the place in which Fanny’s “better guide” might be found, the place where Providence

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might plant the “stronger desire of resisting every evil inclination,” and the site where moral reflection and judgments—motivated by inclinations planted by God—would operate. In short, Austen’s prayers are directed toward God the Father, rather like an omniscient narrator who is “every where present” and from whom “no secret can be hid” (453). Teaching by a moral exemplar (“to endeavour after a truly Christian spirit,” 456) appears once in the three prayers, and this single instance is the only allusion to Christ, if only as an ethical model, that they contain .The relative absence of Christ and the overwhelming predominance of the other two aspects of the Trinity in Austen’s prayers offer a refutation to MacDonagh’s statement that “Jane Austen’s Christianity was Christocentric” (7). Christ was crucial to Austen, of course, but the Evangelical’s unprecedented “sanctification and empowerment of the Holy Spirit” described by Wheeler (407) would have been in keeping with her conception or the “inner voice”—in other words, the Holy Ghost conveying Providential guidance. The implication is that Austen assumes the reading of the Gospels, in itself an individualistic act, to be a theological ground to prevent the solipsism of antinomianism. While the moral education achieved by reading the Bible is not broached by Austen in Mansfield Park, her contemporaneous letter of November 18, 1814 does discuss approvingly someone’s “acting more strictly up to the precepts of the New Testament than others” (Letters 280). This often-quoted letter refers to a person with Evangelical leanings. A great deal has been made of individual moral judgment as it was found in the contemporary Evangelical movement within Anglican Episcopalism (Lodge “Vocabulary” 275–82; Roberts 142–54; Brooke 126–32). Rather than engage in this often-held but still unresolved debate over Austen and Evangelism, I prefer to shift the discussion of her religion to the larger perspective of Protestantism as a whole. I refer to another work that could never have influenced Mansfield Park intertextually or have been influenced by it, but remains a work that contains uncanny parallels to Austen’s novel. In order to gain such a wide perspective, I will briefly introduce a coeval German work that will provide a larger Protestant and Romantic context for Fanny’s individualism: it is that demonstrated by the protagonist of “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” / “Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele” section of Goethe’ s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship / Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (the translation is mine). As with Anglican Evangelicalism, I will set the details of Pietism aside. More important are the authorial inflections given to the religious consciousness of Austen’s protagonist and that of

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Goethe’s partly fictional autobiography of a woman acquaintance.17 The Beautiful Soul is far more overt in her religious expression than is Fanny. Goethe’s believer refers to God as her “closest friend” or “confidant” / “Vertrauter” (360) and refers to her relation to Him as a “close connection with the Invisible Friend” / “Bekanntschaft mit dem unsichtbaren Freunde” (370). If the comparison serves no other purpose, it may help to break through Austen’s High Church reticence concerning the spiritual as opposed to pastoral specifics. Austen, within her novel, avoids direct statement on precisely what the epistemological source is for Fanny’s “better guide” within. Both works, as I suggest, may share a common Protestant confidence in the verity of an “inner light” that transcends all collective ties of family, friends, and even country. The Beautiful Soul expresses the absoluteness of these individualistic ethics: Ich erklärte mit männlichem Trotz, daβ ich [ . . . ] für meine Handlungen völlige Freiheit verlange, daβ mein Tun und Lassen von meiner Überzeugung abhängen müsse; daβ ich zwar niemals eigensinning auf meiner Meinung beharren, vielmehr jede Gründe gerne anhören wolle, aber da es mein eignes Glück betreffe, müsse die Entscheidung von mir abhängen, und keine Art von Zwang würde ich dulden. [I declared with almost manly defiance that I demanded untrammeled freedom to determine my actions; that my conduct must derive from my beliefs; that I would never stubbornly insist on what I thought was right without listening to the opposing arguments, but I myself must decide on what will constitute the ground of my own happiness, the ultimate decision would be mine, and I would resist any sort of pressure from elsewhere.] (379)

On reading of the Beautiful Soul’s willingness to listen to all the various arguments while at the same time reserving the final decision for herself, I cannot help but think of Fanny listening patiently to Sir Thomas and even to Edmund trying to convince her to marry Mr. Crawford. The Beautiful Soul has this to say to her father about her refusal to marry Narcissus, who expects her to compromise her religious convictions: Ich seigte ihm [ . . . ] wie gewi ich sei, daβ ich recht handle, da ich bereit sei, diese Gewiβheit mit dem Verlust des geliebten Bräutigams und anscheinenden Glücks, ja, wenn es nötig wäre, mit Hab und Gut zu versiegeln; daβ ich lieber mein Vaterland, Eltern und Freunde verlassen und mein Brot in der Fremde verdienen, als gegen mein Einsichten handeln wolle.

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Her resolution is as unshakeable, as I believe Fanny’s to be when she is sent down to Portsmouth; unlike Fanny, however, the Beautiful Soul is not made to face financial or social humiliations.Furthermore, unlike Fanny, the Beautiful Soul is in love with the suitor. “Wollte er meine Überzeugung nicht stören, so war ich die Seine; ohne diese Bedingung hätte ich ein Königreich mit ihm ausgeschlagen [If only he would not impose on my beliefs, I would be his; lacking this stipulation, I would have declined to share a kingdom with him]” (381). The terms of Narcissus grow more exacting on the independence of his intended wife: “Lieβ er mir seine Hand nochmals antragen, freilich mit der Bedingung, daβ ich als Gattin eines Mannes, de rein Haus machen mute, meine Gesinnungen würde zu ändern haben. Ich dankte höflich, und eilte mit Herz und Sinn von dieser Geschichte weg, wie man sich aus dem Schauspielhause heraus sehnt, wenn der Vorhang gefallen ist [he asked once again for my hand, but this time with the condition that, as the wife of a man who would have to establish a household, I would need to change my religious convictions. I offered a courteous reply, and pulled my heart and mind away from the whole episode as one leaves a theater after the curtain has fallen]” (382). The Beautiful Soul, born to wealth, lives a full and relatively happy life without a husband and without surrendering her independence. Even Fanny, born to poverty and brought up in enslavement to gratitude, is ultimately rewarded for what ultimately derives from neither: moral individualism. Germany, like England, was going through a great age of Protestant thought. Goethe, in this respect, was one among many. There is an even more contemporaneous, indeed, unquestionably Romantic terminology to describe Fanny’s sudden, out-of-the-blue strength: that of F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1763–1834), a compatriot of Goethe. This theologian contended that we make moral choices by “the consciousness of God” in each individual (Vidler 22–24). Schleiermacher sees the human consciousness as being subject to an immediate operation or workings of God: Ihr habt wohl nie den Beruf gefühlt, euch anzuschmiegen an die wenigen religiösen Menschen, die ihr vielleicht sehen könnt—obgleich

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sie immer anziehend liebenswert genug sind—um etwa durch das Mikroskop der Freundschaft oder der näheren Kenntnis, die ihr wenigstens ähnlich sieht, genauer zu untersuchen, wie sie fürs Universum und durch dasselbe organisiert sind. Mir, der ich sie fleiig betrachtet habe, der ich sie ebenso mühsam aufsuche und mit eben der heiligen Sorgfalt beobachte, welche ihr den Seltenheiten der Natur widnet, mir ist es oft eingefallen, ob nicht schon das euch zur Religion führen könnte, wenn ihr nur acht darauf fäbet, wie allmächtig die Gottheit den Teil der Seele, in welchem sie vorzüglich wohnt, in welchem sie sich in ihren unmittebaren Wirkungen offenbart und sich selbst beshaut, auch als ihr Allerheilgstes ganz eigen erbaut und absondert von allen, was sonst in Menschen gebaut und bebildet wird, und wie sie sich darin durch die unerschöpflichste Mannigfaltigkeit der Formen in ihren ganzen Reichtum verherrlicht. [You may never have felt the calling to befriend the few religious people whom you might be able to discover—even though they are always attractive and worthy enough of affection—in order to investigate more closely—through the microscope of friendship or, something effectively similar, a closer acquaintance—how they are constituted for and by the universe. For my part, I have diligently examined them. I seek them out just as assiduously and observe them with the same holy care you devote to the curiosities of nature; and it has often occurred to me that this might lead you to religion if only you paid heed to how all-powerfully the Deity edifies—from all that has otherwise been developed in man—that part of the soul in which He preeminently abides, in which He manifests in his immediate workings, and mirrors Himself and thereby makes His Holy Sanctuary quite special and distinct, and if you only were to notice how, therein, the Deity exalts himself through the inexhaustible manifoldness and opulence of forms.] (4: 373, the translation is mine)

The Holy Sanctuary, in short, is the individual human soul, and that soul is the constant recipient of direct guidance from the in-dwelling and inward-working God. Schleiermacher, in the words of an historian of Anglican theology, believed it to be “an ultimate fact that the soul is immediately aware of God. And this awareness is not the result of any deliberate attempt to withdraw from the world, and to find God by self-concentration, or in forced passivity to await the touch of the divine. God is present to every man as he goes about his daily work.” And this approach to God and the individual conscience had a powerful effect upon Romantic Anglican thought (Storr 236). Works by Schleiermacher were translated into English as soon as they appeared in Germany. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, knew and wrote copious marginalia upon two translated works of Schleiermacher

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(12: 469–86). According to one historian of Anglicanism, “Coleridge viewed religion as the manifestation of an inner essence” (Sachs 39). For all my interest in direct or indirect influences, I see no need to seek any by Schleiermacher, by Goethe, by the Pietists, or by the Evangelists upon Austen. I am satisfied to view their ideas on Providence as parallel solutions achieved by Austen and the others— each working independently to push the 200-year-old Protestantism of Martin Luther and that of Thomas Crammer to their logical conclusion. Romantic scholars should always keep in mind that Romanticism was a time of rich culminations and animations in Christian thought. To my way of thinking, indications of parallel, contemporaneous ripening of ideas are more insightful than mutual direct influences. Such coincidental parallels indicate an extensive climate of opinion and can aid in understanding the full scope of Romanticism. The punishment Fanny receives for her maverick behavior is slight to what it might have been; it would be naive to think that even in the transition from the early modern to the modern world, individualism was given free reins in Protestant countries. The myths of class, the facts of capitalism, the double standard for the sexes, and even age differences would insure that this would not be so. What we can now view today as Fanny’s noble stand on conscience is viewed by the early nineteenth-century Sir Thomas as “willfulness” and “selfconceit”: “I had thought you peculiarly free from willfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offense.” The patriarch reechoes the phrase “young women” to give particular directions and point to his deep indignation. This reader, for one, thinks not only of Elizabeth Bennett’s predicament with Mr. Collins but also of Bernard Shaw’s famous comparison of English upper-class marriages to prostitution when Sir Thomas says: “The advantage or disadvantage of your family—of your parents— your brothers and sisters—never seems to have had a moment’s share in your thoughts on this occasion. How they might be benefited, how they must rejoice in such an establishment for you—is nothing to you. You think only of yourself” (318 [387]). At the end of his long Jeremiad, he catches her conscience, without conquering it, by means of a single emphatically spoken word, “ingratitude” (319 [368]). Apparently, gratitude constitutes the wages of charity and other sorts of economic aid. Merely by speaking this word, Sir Thomas sets off the responses ingrained in Fanny by years of social conditioning: “her uncle’s anger gave her the severest pain of all. Selfish and ungrateful!

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to have appeared so to him!” Indeed, the training is such as to physically affect Fanny: “In about a quarter of an hour her uncle returned; she was almost ready to faint at the sight of him” (321 [370]). Sir Thomas sends her on a little walk through the shrubbery; this offers an excuse for her Aunt Norris—who wanted Fanny to fetch objects from her own house—to denounce Fanny for taking “her own independent walk” and for displaying “independence and nonsense” (323 [373]). Surely, the words independent and independence are not accidental, but rather their reiteration suggests a larger sociopolitical context. Well aware of the ironic complexities and contradictions of perspectives on the subject of individualism, Austen’s narrator picks up the viewpoint of the patriarch on Aunt Norris’s Jeremiad: “As a general reflection on Fanny, Sir Thomas thought nothing could be more unjust, though he had been so lately expressing the same sentiments himself” (324 [373]). It is thus apparent that, in Sir Thomas’s mind, what is proper for the Patriarch is not proper for any female and for especially the second-poorest female relation at Mansfield Park, whom he is beginning to like far less than the poorest. Although not un-resisted, especially when displayed by women, individualism as it appears in what many call the first modern English novel18 is a highly evolved construct. Moving from the elitist status of being appropriate for scholars and patricians in the Italian Renaissance, spreading down to the upper middle class with the Northern Reformation, individualism was by the time of Austen and Romanticism finding hopeful adherents among the less privileged sectors of society. Even a Fanny Price, marginalized as she is by class and gender, makes her practical claims on individual consciences— claims that for two centuries Protestantism theoretically proffered for underprivileged women like her, at least on a spiritual level. In 1814, the Anglican Austen shows us what can only be a miracle: a young woman beaten down by social and economic forces shows great strength of character in the face of restrained, subtle, but unrelenting opposition. Critics have tried to secularize Fanny’s decision by viewing it as being based on her love for Edmund. Materialists have a way of explaining away the providential working out of the narrative: they convert it from a Christian to a secular ideology by explaining it in terms of Fanny’s selfish calculations. Gay, for example, offers the view that Fanny redeems this theatrical fall by holding out against the proposal: “she proves herself a true Christian heroine by using the unavoidably public and performative nature of her courtship by Henry to bear witness to her own integrity” (118). In terms of authorial

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control, Williams reduces the supernatural to a metaphor: Austen “guides her heroines, steadily, to the right marriages. She makes settlements, alone, against all odds, like some supernatural lawyer, in terms of that exact proportion to moral worth which could assure the continuity of the general formula” (Raymond 116). It is—simply put—her ideology, and one woman’s superstructure is another’s transcendence. Wiltshire contends, “To read the novel as offering Fanny as the model of integrity and principle, the undeviatingly moral masthead of Mansfield Park, is to forget that her unspoken love—the more powerful for its suppression—is the instigator of her conduct, not her rectitude” (Jane Austen and the Body 84). This is carrying a physical reading of Austen too far; it is body without a soul—very un-Austen. Filially, it certainly was written without a recollection of the marriage rite from The Book of Common Prayer in which there is no separation of love and rectitude: one might call into question at this point any vague hope of marrying Edmund; however, one cannot call into question her refusal to join in “Holy Matrimony” with Crawford. Waldron sees it with secular eyes: “Fanny’s love for Edmund is the main motive for her determined rejection of Crawford and her dislike and fear of Mary” (106; cf. also Sales 96). It is almost as if these scholars are attempting to avoid a religious reading at all costs. I, also, dare say that unless these scholars memorize the Anglican marriage rite, they will continue to be blinded by their post-Freudian and postmodernist preconceptions of what Jane Austen might signify by love. The very structure of the narrative of many great novels is in itself either an ideology or the working out of a transcendent Being. Even in a booklength study of Austen’s religion, Koppel calls the uncanny sequence of events in her novels “random, without higher significance” (63). Thus, for Koppel—and additionally, for Giffin—Providence is not a matter to be considered. To deny the Providence (as well as the concomitant concept of omniscient narrative) behind the doings of Fanny is to deny the basic structure of great novels—such as Tom Jones, War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, or any of the Austen six—based as they all are on seeming coincidence, apparently fortuitous meetings, and sudden inner enlightenments. How does one set about arguing against such a materialistic, secular view? One could of course argue that Fanny’s ideas of love and marriage are canonically in keeping with their presentation in the marriage liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer. Furthermore, her marriage with Crawford would be in opposition to the letter and spirit of that liturgy. It might be best, however, to meet these secularizers of Mansfield Park on their own terms. They fail to face the hard

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material fact: economically speaking, from a class and property point of view, Fanny’s love for Edmund is a hopeless love if she sees marriage as the outcome. Fanny could dream she might marry Edmund, but she would not have the slightest grounds in reality for expecting it to really happen. How could she think her refusal of Crawford would put her nearer to such an end? The fact is that the re-reader of the text knows the miraculous, providential ending of the novel; the first-time reader—solely on the basis of genre convention—might well suspect this eventual uniting of Fanny and Edmund in Holy Matrimony. This knowledge or genre expectation still fails to change the fact that this ending at the outset of Volume Three and in the mind of its protagonist is beyond all reasoning on the basis of economics and the other considerations of class. The reader knows or hopes for such a marriage, but even taking the most optimistic view, Fanny cannot expect it beyond a vague but always economically hopeless hope. To put Fanny’s unprecedented declaration of independence from Sir Thomas on such materialistic bases is to deny the entire environmental conditioning and its obvious marked results on her personality. In a strictly Jacobin or any other materialistic point of view, this deviation from conditioning is impossible. As already discussed, the proof of Fanny’s conditioning is found in the moment when—after a long period of resisting the theatrical—Fanny yields at the very last moment to take the part of another player in the rehearsal and to act in a play of which she heartily disapproves. She is saved from what would be, after all, a minor moral fall by the unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas. Austen emphasized both moments by uniting and placing them dramatically at the finale of Volume One; one can only imagine that this must have been a thrilling bit of suspense for the renters of Volume One, who might have to wait for the return of Volume Two to the lending library so that they would be able to rent and read it. In this earlier instance, Fanny shows how warped she is by being the poor relation at Mansfield Park—she capitulates. Fanny’s capitulation demonstrates that Austen is all that the materialists say she is—indeed, the novelist’s conception of Fanny’s conditioning by her environment is more radical than they have heretofore read it. Fanny, however, is much more; Austen is much more, and so is her Mansfield Park. There are cases where the material and the spiritual meet: religious symbolism—especially as object, as iconography. Giffin handles iconography with some brilliance. On this one point at least, he has gotten much closer than others to the heart of the novel—and this heart is a religious one. Edmund—ever since childhood, and he provided stationary for the newly arrived Fanny to write to her

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brother, William—has tried to rectify Fanny’s inequitous position in the possession of objects. Edmund and William work together to the end of combining object and spirit—an end that Crawford seeks to undercut: Austen is clear about this stark choice between Edmund and Crawford— one associated with good, the other with evil—when she has William give Fanny a cross to wear, but prevents him from affording a chain to put it on. The symbolism that surrounds the ensuing drama of the chain is quite obvious. The cross gives Fanny’s mission Christological overtones that Edmund wants to encourage and Crawford wants to discourage. Hence they both contrive to give Fanny a chain on which to put her cross, because this chain will determine under whose banner she will fight, the banner of the church or the banner of its worldly enemy. (Giffin 140–44)

The iconography, whether the materialists like it or not, ineluctably points out the fact that Fanny is more: she is a creation of a believer in a providential Deity. The materialistic view is turned round on its head: the object, imbued with transcendent belief, points toward this Divinity. The secular, materialist critic is perfectly within her or his rights to condemn as a breach of postmodernity this aspect of Austen—but not to ignore it or gloss it away. In this quest to understand and revalue Fanny’s soul, I began with physical objects. Objects are important but, like all that is ephemeral, they are only truly so when they signify more. As Goethe put it, “Alles Vergängliche / Ist nu rein Gleichnis [All that is transitory / Is only a symbol]” (3: 364). Seen in a material light, the objects of Mansfield Park amount to very little; seen in a spiritual light, they point to an inner consciousness that suggests Evangelicals and Quakers. My attempt to analyze these radical positions within Protestantism, even Anglicanism itself, will I hope give the lie to a suspicion that, by placing such a heavy interest on Austen’s Anglicanism, with perhaps a High Church bias, I am joining with Butler, Duckworth, and others in emphasizing the novelist’s Tory side. Rather I see Austen’s mixture of conservative with progressive values—containing an equal share of both. Merely because in her own quiet way she was as radical a feminist as Mary Wollstonecraft or Germaine de Staël, say, does not mean that she lacks her conservative Anglican side. Indeed, it is part of my long-term goal to demonstrate that this religious aspect contains new strains of what can be termed Romantic Protestantism, which in turn complements and even guides the individualist and, therefore, feminist side of Austen. Take a modern American equivalent of the

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novelist’s church: the Episcopalian Church. It is quite probable to find an extreme High Church conservative in liturgy, calling for the old version of The Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible, combined in the same individual with progressive views on the issue such as women priests, or even radical views on gay priests, or gay marriages. Austen, in religion as in politics, demonstrates a complexity that defies labels such as spiritualist, materialist, Tory, Liberal, High Church, or Low. The novelist, like her Elizabeth Bennett and Fanny Price, was a declared independent and individualist.

Notes 1. What really has to be termed the anti-Fanny faction prominently includes R. F. Brissenden, “Mansfield Park: Freedom and the Family,” Jane Austen: Bicentenary, ed. John Halperin (London: Cambridge, 1975), 156–71 and Nina Auerbach, “Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price,” Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (New York: Chelsea House, 1987). (8). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Nota Bene-Yale, 2000), are not entirely negative (165–68)—nor is Isobel Armstrong, Jane Austen: “Mansfield Park” (London: Penguin, 1988). Duckworth leads the pro-Fanny group; see Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 71–80. Tanner offers the matter his usual clarity. He objects to her passivity and to the fact that “[s]he is never, ever, wrong” (see Tony Tanner, Jane Austen [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 143). I admit the passivity; however, on crucial issues, I see it as a passivity of strength like that of Gandhi, say. And she is—by her own rights—dead wrong at one strategic point: at the climax of volume one, she feels “she must yield” and participate as an understudy in the performance of Lovers’ Vows (The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 6 vols. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1933–69], 3: 172). The fact that she yields now to Edmund and the others only emphasizes her moment of glory when she refuses Mr. Crawford and stands up to Sir Thomas and even Edmund (301–2, 315–20, 347). A recent defender, McGrail gives an interesting materialistic reading of Fanny (see Anne B. McGrail, “Fanny Price’s ‘Customary Subjectivity’: Rereading the Individual in Mansfield Park,” A Companion to Jane Austen Studies, ed. Laura Cooper Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000], 57–70). The best corrective reading of Lovers’ Vows within the moral attitudes of Fanny and the entire novel is by Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994), 116–24; most other readings have been oversimplified.

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R o dn e y Fa r n s w o r t h 2. The core argument and substantial portions of this study were presented either at the International Conference on Romanticism in 2001, at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, or in 2002, at Florida State University, Talahassee. 3. A clear, broad, yet deep picture of the evolution away from medieval forms of collectivity can be gained from the half-century-old, but by no means replaced, series called The Rise of Modern Europe and edited by William L. Langer. The volumes by Friedrich, Nussbaum, Wolf, Roberts, Dorn, Gershoy, Brinton, Bruun, and Artz cover much of the early modern world and the beginnings of the modern world. 4. See Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin, Vol. 6 of The Story of Civilization, 11 vols. (1935–75), 533–34. In his classic study of The English Reformation, Dickens traces a strong English tradition of reading the Bible in the vernacular back to the Wycliffite Bible (33–37) as well as the transformative power of the Bible in the later Reformation (129–38). Another historian (as well as Austen scholar), Brooke rightly reiterates this in the context of the author’s religion (see Christopher Brooke, Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality [Cambridge, MA: Brewer, 1999], 120). The roots of Austen’s Protestantism run deep. 5. Although I rely on the primary material of Austen’s novels, letters, and prayers, as well as The Book of Common Prayer, the discussions of the novelist’s religion by Koppel, Giffin, W. Roberts (109–54), Kelley (149–69), MacDonagh (1–19), and Brooke (119–50) have proved very useful. MacDonagh finds in letters written around the time that Austen was working on Mansfield Park an “implicit leaning towards the sturdy Protestant . . . element in Anglicanism” (5). 6. The Oxford Edition of the Novels edited by Chapman is cited first; the new Cambridge Edition of Mansfield Park edited by Wiltshire is in square brackets. 7. Wallace suggests that for Aunt Norris “Fanny’s arrival sustains for her a fiction of being equal to the Bertrams. Through Fanny, Mrs. Norris can imagine herself a figure as powerful as Sir Thomas, conferring benefits on a less fortunate relation” (Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority [New York: St. Martin’s, 1995], 61). 8. Since I have subsumed this subject under the ethical and spiritual elements of the world, I only touch on the richness of objects in the novel—cf. Hardy. Deresiewicz oddly paganizes a Christian novel calling the objects as Austen presents them in Mansfield Park “fetishes,” which he defines as “objects invested with extraordinary emotional power, and even felt, totemically, as possessing a life or spirit of their own” (William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 71–78). 9. I am reminded of the ethical traps Alfred Hitchcock sets for his film viewers.

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10. Johnson finds a clear parallel between “slavery and the stress on gratitude,” specifically (Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 106–7). 11. Oddly enough, Giffin questions whether or not Sir Thomas really wants Fanny to marry Crawford (Michael Giffin, Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002], 141); it seems to me that Austen has written his dialogue to convey his utter surprise, indeed disbelief at her refusal—he keeps reiterating the word “refuse,” culminating in “This is very strange!” (314 [364]) and “This is beyond me” (316 [365]). 12. On Fanny’s hypothetical succumbing, see, e.g., MacDonagh (Oliver MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991], 12); this scholar based his view on the possibility that Henry Crawford would have been constant, which in essence would mean that he were a different person entirely—one in short Fanny could love; Crawford’s “constancy” is doubted by Fanny (343 [396]) and even by Sir Thomas (345 [399]). The recent film version of Mansfield Park has Fanny giving in and accepting Crawford, then refusing her hand the next day; presumably based remotely on Austen’s similar treatment of Harris BiggWither. 13. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 43–46, 77–78, 113, 169–73; and 181; Butler finds also that Austen retains “some of the upper-class individualism of the Enlightenment” (181). The influence of Evangelicalism on Austen remains open to question. MacDonagh writes, “There is nothing to establish that Fanny is an enthusiast or even a positive Evangelical” (14). He leaves the question open concerning possible subtle influences. 14. Cf. Kathryn Sutherland, Introduction to Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1996), vii–xxxii; I will go so far as to grant Sutherland that Austen more than hints at the fact that adversity is crucial in making Fanny, Edmund, and the transformed Tom turn inward, reflect, and judge. 15. R. W. Chapman and other scholars have puzzled out the central phrase; Mary Lascelles has offered an emendation that fits with Fanny’s other moral dicta about the inwardness and individuality of conscience: “And, alas! Now as always no known principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in” (548, n. for 329); cf. Wiltshire notes to the Cambridge Edition (712, n. 1). Sutherland suggests that the sentences are correct as printed, and its odd syntax is intended by Austen to represent “the rhythms of Fanny’s inner monologue— speaking, this scholar thinks, in Miltonic cadences” (408). I would hasten to add that it is the inner light or voice speaking also in the

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R o dn e y Fa r n s w o r t h equally elevated, elliptical, and lapidary cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. 16. I have used Chapman’s Oxford Edition. Stovel compares Austen’s communal or family prayers to those in the Book of Common Prayer and posits more prayers that have not survived (Bruce Stovel, “ ‘The Sentient Target of Death’: Jane Austen’s Prayers,” Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and Her Profession, ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996], 195–201). It is interesting to note that the Evangelicals gave unprecedented daily regularity for family prayers (Kirsten Olsen, All Things Austen: An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World, 2 vols. [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005], 602). Brooke observes that Austen’s “prayers suggest a middle-of-the-road Anglicanism—rather high than low church,” and she would have found the taint of Calvinism in Evangelical theology distasteful (Jane Austen 128–30). Austen, yet, might have shared some views with them. 17. Goethe used as raw material for the “Confessions” a collection of writings left by Susanna von Klettenberg after her death (Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1987], 2: 268). 18. For a survey of earlier opinions and an extensive discussion of the modernity of Mansfield Park, see Gard 121–54.

Chapter 7

Th e L i t e r a l a n d L i t e r a ry C i rc u l at ion of A m e l i a C u r r a n’s Port r a i t of P e rc y Sh e l l e y Diane Long Hoe veler

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enry James’s novella The Aspern Papers (1888; rev. 1908) has most typically been read as a critical examination of the literary scholar’s obsession with the mystery of creativity.1 There are, of course, obvious and numerous autobiographical resonances to James’s own life in the tale (e.g., James’s interest in the figures of Pushkin, Walt Whitman, Julian Hawthorne, Constance Fenimore Woolson, etc.), 2 but this essay focuses instead on the presence of what I would call the strange afterlives of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont in the story. Presented as a famous American poet from New York and once the beloved of the now elderly daughter of a prominent American portrait painter, the portrait of the ghostly Jeffrey Aspern—not his papers—is, I would claim, the central and haunting object of desire in the story. One of the most memorable images remaining in one’s mind after reading the story is that beautiful disembodied male head, called a “relic” by the narrator, that has floated from its original and very private storage place in Juliana’s pocket (93) into the pocket of the narrator after Juliana’s death (131) and finally to its ultimate relocation in a public place of honor above the narrator’s writing desk (143). I would claim that James intended this portrait to be modeled very specifically on Amelia Curran’s famous painting of Percy Shelley

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(see figure 7.1), completed in Rome in 1819, a portrait that was so well known that it had assumed iconic and almost religious status by the time James was writing his novella.3 Presenting the poet sitting with a long quill pen in his beautifully shaped hand, the portrait was an idealized representation of masculine poetic creativity, of the highly feminized male poet in love not with human bodies but with the ideas of art and beauty. This essay focuses on that portrait as a homosocial exchange object, triangulated within the story by a series of convoluted negotiations

Figure 7.1

Amelia Curran’s portrait of Percy Shelley.

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between two women and a man (Juliana, Tina, and the narrator), or two men and a woman (Juliana’s father the artist, Juliana, and Aspern), or two men and a city (the narrator, Aspern, and the body of Venice as visual spectacle, sexless and yet seductive), just as the earlier historical incident on which the story is based was also triangulated in multiple ways: for instance, by Byron, Shelley, and Claire Clairmont; or Byron, Claire, and Allegra, their daughter; or Mary Shelley, Shelley, and Claire; or Shelley, Claire, and possibly their mysterious daughter. In short, I would claim that The Aspern Papers is about how desire endlessly circulates in families, and by extension cultures; or more specifically, how the act of creating cultural products actually short-circuits familial desire, producing a strange substitute-formation, the scholarly artifact—whether papers or portrait—as homosocial fetishized exchange object. It is necessary to begin by noting that the originating anecdote that James heard and that motivated his writing of the story is based on the fact that he had learned that Claire Clairmont (b. April 27, 1789?; d. March 19, 1879, Firenze) was living with her niece Pauline Clairmont recently in Florence and in supposed possession of some priceless Shelley letters.4 At almost the same time he was told about a conversation with the Countess Gamba, a relative of Lord Byron’s last mistress, the Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccion, who confessed that she had destroyed at least one scandalous letter exchanged between Byron and Teresa. As James noted after hearing these anecdotes, “I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table” (x). Grasping the personal histories of both Shelley and Byron from the near past as if they were objects on a table allows James to place them also within our imaginative grasps, but more importantly he seems to be privileging the need to come to terms with the literary heritage of “Romanticism” with a capital R. What James has created in this work is an enactment of the obsessive power of literary and scholarly desire, as if those fetishized and dead male Romantic poets, laid out on a dissecting table, can be grasped, seized, and resurrected as love objects, not by their discarded female paramours, but by the masculine literary tradition itself. It is necessary, however, to recognize the strange errors and oversights that have been made by James scholars, a usually meticulous group of people. Throughout the criticism on The Aspern Papers Claire has been erroneously referred to as Percy Shelley’s “second wife,” as well as Mary Shelley’s cousin, her sister, or her half-sister.5

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In fact, James himself makes this mistake (vi), but Claire was the illegitimate daughter of Mary Jane Clairmont, a woman who was living next door to William Godwin when he became the widower of Mary Wollstonecraft and the father to both their two-week-old daughter, Mary, and Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, the three-year-old Fanny Imlay. Mrs. Clairmont, as she called herself, had never married and yet she had a son and daughter, paternity unknown (presumably not to her). Godwin was desperate for a caretaker for his two daughters and Mary Jane Clairmont found herself in the right place at the right time. In fact, shortly after their marriage Mary Jane gave birth to Godwin’s only son and namesake, William, a name used later for the unlucky younger brother of Victor Frankenstein and, of course, the first victim killed by Frankenstein’s creature. So much for Mary Shelley’s attitude toward her step-siblings. The fact that Claire and Mary grew up in the same large and fairly chaotic household did not make them sisters or cousins. Legally, they were stepsisters, but Mary had nothing but contempt for Mrs. Clairmont and she spent her life bitterly regretting the tie she had with Claire, who saw Mary as a sexual and intellectual competitor her entire life. Part two of this family romance occurs when Mary Shelley began having an affair with the married and very highly regarded poet Percy Shelley. Like some eerie doppelgänger, Claire was compelled to seek out an even more popular and also married poet, Lord Byron, and to begin an affair with him. As Mary became pregnant with Shelley’s lovechild, so did Claire after four months become pregnant with Byron’s child, giving birth to a daughter named Allegra, a child who survived only until her fifth birthday. Byron stepped in shortly after the birth of Allegra and claimed his rights as a father, taking the child away from Claire and eventually placing the child in a convent outside of Ravenna where she died from typhus, most likely brought on by neglect.6 Part three of the Claire Clairmont story, however, was the subject of the most notorious gossip throughout Claire’s life. In 1815, and again when they all lived together in Geneva, Byron, Claire, and the Shelleys were rumored to be engaged in a “league of incest,” the four of them randomly intimate with each other with Robert Southey only too willing to spread the tale far and wide. Even more shockingly, however, in January 1819 Percy Shelley appeared in a Neapolitan courthouse with an infant girl and without his wife in order to take out birth papers for the baby girl that he named Elena Adelaide and whom he claimed was his own. This mysterious action has long puzzled Shelley biographers as Mary did not give birth to

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a child at this time and both she and Claire destroyed their journals for the period of six months prior to the child’s birth. No one knows definitely even today who the mother of this child was, but certainly the theory that Claire was the actual mother has been advanced and been supported by a number of odd events, including the fact that a servant in the household attempted to blackmail Shelley about the incident.7 Certainly it has long been asserted that Shelley and Claire had an affair that even Mary knew about and was forced to condone. Evidence for this affair is strewn throughout Shelley’s letters as well as his “Epipsychidion,” where Claire is represented as a “tempest” to Mary’s “moon.” This historical background, well known to scholars of Romanticism, makes it clear that Claire was recognized throughout her own era as a fairly notorious woman, possibly giving birth, like her mother, to two illegitimate children, fathered by two different men. By blatantly aligning his portrait of Juliana Bordereau with Claire, James would have been broadly winking to his contemporary reading audience, most of whom would have been in the know about the intimate history of such a woman, who was notorious as something of a poetic groupie; gossip, it would appear, has become a form of high art in this tale.8 But if one does not know that Claire was exchanged between both Byron and Shelley, and that in fact she was rumored to have had an illegitimate daughter with each of these famous poets, then the nuances of James’s story are lost. Notice how the portrait—representing a visual presentation of the idealized and bodiless male poet—functions in opposition to the papers—or the literal and factual—throughout the story. In order to make my case that the portrait of Aspern is intended by James to recall to his contemporary readers the portrait of Percy Shelley, it is necessary to trace the public circulation of Amelia Curran’s painting. The earliest public appearance of a copy of the portrait occurred in the ornate frontispiece of the Galignani brothers’ edition of The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (Paris, 1829), containing bustlength likenesses of all three poets. Mary Shelley used a different, waist-length derivation of the Curran portrait as the frontispiece to her edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works (Moxon, 1839). Another source where James might have seen a variant of the Curran portrait can be found in the third edition of Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources (1859), edited by Mary Shelley’s daughter-in-law Lady Jane Shelley. Harry Buxton Forman used a similar portrait as the frontispiece of his Poetic Works of P—B—S—(1876). Forman’s 1882 edition of the volume used yet another variant of the portrait featuring

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the poet’s disheveled hair, loose collar, and long quill pen. William Michael Rossetti’s three-volume edition of the Poetry of Shelley (1878) has a cut-down and slightly revised variant of the head, neck, and loose collar as the frontispiece for volume one. Suffice it to say that James would have had multiple opportunities to have seen both the Curran portrait and the two major adaptations of it done by Edward Ellerker William (see figure 7.2) and George Clint. The Clint painting was then adapted as an engraving by Edward Francis Finden and used as a frontispiece to the 1839 Poetical Works of Percy

Figure 7.2

Edward William’s portrait of Percy Shelley.

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Shelley (London: Daly) as well as within Finden’s Landscape Illustrations to . . . the Life and Works of Lord Byron (London: Murray, 1832). The portrait of Aspern, moreover, is further merged with the spirit of Venice as another source for communing with the idealized Aspern that the narrator has constructed and pursued: “That spirit kept me perpetual company, and seemed to look out at me from the revived immortal face—in which all his genius shone—of the great poet who was my prompter” (42). Interestingly, throughout the Venetian passage, James uses the words “fraternal,” “mystic companionship,” “moral fraternity” (42–43), all phrases that suggest the homosocial bonding that has occurred between the idealized Aspern, the narrator, and the “body” of Venice, or, by historical extension, between Byron and Shelley over the body of Claire. Venice is also coded throughout the narrative as a “spirit” and we know from James’s travel essays and a later letter to J. A. Symonds that in fact Venice was something of a sexualized locale that had allowed him to admire beautiful young men and then convey that admiration in a somewhat cryptic manner to Symonds. In a travel essay written during a trip to Venice in 1873, James wrote about a group of young men he saw one day while walking, noting that one of the boys “was the most expressively beautiful creature I had ever looked upon. . . . He had a smile to make Correggio sigh in his Grave . . . Verily nature is still at odds with propriety . . . I think I shall always remember, with infinite conjecture, as the years roll by, this little unlettered Eros of the Adriatic stand” (qtd. Bradley 47). Years later James sent this piece to Symonds and then waited for the knowing nod or sign of recognition, but nothing arrived. He finally took the more direct tack of writing a letter in which the wink is a bit broader: I sent you the Century more than a year ago with my paper on Venice. I sent it to you because it was a constructive way of expressing the good will felt towards you in consequence of what you had written about the land of Italy—and of intimating to you, somewhat dumbly, that I am an attentive and sympathetic reader. I nourish for the said Italy an unspeakably tender passion, and your pages always seemed to me that you were one of the small number of people who love it as much as do—in addition to your knowing it immeasurably better. I wanted to recognize this (to your knowledge), for it seemed to me the victims of a common passion should exchange a look. (qtd. in Bradley 53)9

Exchanging “looks” would appear to be what the narrator wants to do with Aspern via the portrait, but the “eyes” of Juliana and Tina keep blocking his view. In fact, the narrator begins to fantasize that he is in direct communion with the spirit of Aspern over the body of Venice

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as mediated by the fading Juliana, thinking that he hears Aspern nudge and whisper to him, “ ‘Strange as it may appear to you she was very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile, aren’t we in Venice together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends?’ ” (43). The narrator, of course, initially claims that he wants to purchase the Aspern papers and his original design is to try to locate where they are stored in the shabby Venetian rooms the women inhabit. He settles on a “particular tall old Empire secretary with brass ornaments of the style of the Empire—a receptacle somewhat infirm but still capable of keeping rare secrets” sealed with a “peevish little lock” (100). When he seems to be staring too blatantly at the secretary, he diverts Tina’s attention by mentioning the portrait of Aspern, suggesting that the portrait and the papers are in some way tied together in his mind. And they are, because the secretary with its “peevish little lock” becomes increasingly identified with the literal and by extension, with Juliana’s body, just as the portrait reminds us of the narrator’s obsession with the metaphorical, the idealized and abstract, a bodiless poet. In his manic pursuit of the remains of Jeffrey Aspern, the narrator enacts a recognizable cultural script: he desires to recreate the masculine poetic genius as all mind, free from the taints or corruptions that are inherent in associating with the female body, and concomitantly with generation, reproduction, and emotion. To say that the text encodes a loathing for the female body is not to say anything particularly new about it.10 What is most psychologically telling about the tale is the way that Claire Clairmont’s personal sexual history functions as a very broad wink to his reading audience, an unspoken and yet underlying source of scandal and nausea, suggesting a revulsion toward the female body which in turn sets off the even more intense need to fixate on the masculine and beautiful disembodied head. In juxtaposition to the open and engaging face and beautiful eyes of Aspern, we are presented with Juliana’s rather eccentric habit of wearing a green eye shade to conceal her eyes, a gesture that transforms her into something of a death’s head: “the upper half of her face was covered by the fall of a piece of dingy lacelike muslin, a sort of extemporised hood which, wound round her head, descended to the end of her nose, leaving nothing visible but her white withered cheeks and puckered mouth, closed tightly” (104). The veil is finally raised when Juliana catches the narrator in the act of raiding the secretary for the papers: Juliana stood there in her night-dress, by the doorway of her room, watching me; her hands were raised, she had lifted the everlasting curtain that covered half her face, and for the first, the last, the only time

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I beheld her extraordinary eyes. They glared at me; they were like the sudden drench, for a caught burglar, of a flood of gaslight; they made me horribly ashamed. (118)

This scene is the moment we have been waiting for since the story began: the confrontation of the hero with the Medusa’s head. Like a little boy rustling around for some secret in his mother’s drawers, the narrator is caught in a nursery drama, the reenactment of a primal scene in which he has attempted to ferret out the sexual secrets of his substitute parent figures. It would appear, in fact, that this act is an invasion of the tainted female body in order to remove for safe keeping the literal remains of his masculine poetic deity. This raid on the mother’s territory is for the narrator, an act of homosocial loyalty, a way of disengaging Aspern from his earlier and unfortunate association with the promiscuous and unworthy Juliana. For her part, Juliana does not survive this shock for long, and very quickly the narrator is into the final stages of negotiating for his desired property with Tina, the heir of Aspern’s legacy: I looked at Jeffrey Aspern’s face in the little picture, partly in order not to look at that of my companion [Tina], which had begun to trouble me, even to frighten me a little—it had taken so very odd, so strained and unnatural a cast . . . I but privately consulted Jeffrey Aspern’s delightful eyes with my own—they were so young and brilliant and yet so wise and so deep . . . now that I held the little picture in my hand I felt it would be a precious possession. “Is this a bribe to make me give up the papers?” I presently and all perversely asked. “Much as I value this, you know, if I were to be obliged to choose the papers are what I should prefer. Ah but ever so much!” (131)

Later, when he first hears Tina timidly put forward the idea that he needs to become a “relation” in order to possess the papers, the narrator turns his attention again to the little portrait: “It was embarrassing, and I bent my head over Jeffrey Aspern’s portrait. What an odd expression was in his face! ‘Get out of it as you can, my dear fellow!’ I put the picture into the pocket of my coat and said to Miss Tina: ‘Yes, I’ll sell it for you’ ” (133). Claiming that he has sold the portrait and is sending her the proceeds, the narrator later comments that as he looks at the portrait hanging above his writing desk, “When I look at it I can scarcely bear my loss—I mean of the precious papers” (143). But James’s earlier version of this line (1888) had read: “When I look at it [the portrait] my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable” (CT 382). There is a shift here that suggests something

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deeply dishonest. “Chagrin” becomes transformed into “loss,” and simple embarrassment becomes instead a trauma that is almost unbearable as the narrator has contemplated the events over time (or the author has had twenty years to consider the real object of his character’s quest). But that revised qualification about “loss,” added as a tag at the end of the sentence, functions as a dodge, a way of trying to express what he knows he in fact can bear, the loss of the papers. So is it the papers or the portrait that have functioned as the fetishized love object throughout the novella? If we consider Freud’s explanation of fetishism (limited, to be sure, to the male libido as “normative”), we can assume that it is the mother’s difference from the male body that strikes horror in the boy because it reifies his own fear of castration, his own nausea at her “wounded” body (hence the focus on Juliana’s eyes and her horribly withered face). As long as the substitute fetish object that denies the visual trauma can be kept in view (the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern), it allows the boy to continue to believe in the imaginary wholeness of woman (and hence his own wholeness).11 The fetish, then, becomes a “permanent memorial” to the horror of castration that he had glimpsed in the mother’s body. The fetish also is a “token of triumph” and a talismanic safeguard against castration necessary for the male psyche to survive, let alone create works of art (Freud, “Fetishism” 153). I have argued that the papers—the literal remains of Aspern—were never the real object of the narrator’s quest. He has been from the beginning obsessed with vicariously experiencing on an artistic or visual level the relationship that Byron and Shelley had with Claire. He is, in short, a voyeur of the most fastidious kind. He himself does not want to sully his hands with Tina, the probable child of Aspern and Juliana.12 Instead he wants to court the idea of the ghost of Percy Shelley or masculine poetic creativity in his imagination. He wants to participate in an act of homosocial bonding, an alternative sphere that replicates itself not in human beings, but in portraits of human beings. In love with the male image, he seizes the portrait and spends his days staring at it, content with reminiscing about his foray into the castle of Duessa. He braved the female dragons, and emerged with his treasure: the disembodied sacred male head. As a coda, I would like to note that James rewrote his tale in 1908, but in the meantime, four years earlier, Edith Wharton wrote her own version of the same story, “The House of the Dead Hand.”13 Published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1904, Wharton’s story is set in Siena where Wyant, a young British dilettante, has come to see a

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treasured painting by Leonardo owned by the daughter of the eccentric Dr. Lombard. In this story the quest for the connoisseur is to possess the painting of the virgin, called the Lux Mundi, but the painting is unattainable because the daughter, Sybilla, refuses to part with it even after her father’s death. Most striking as a clue to the psychic similarities of the tales is the device of the dead hand that hangs over the entryway of the Lombard house: “the hand was a woman’s—a dead drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house, and had sunk struggling into death” (509). Like the secretary that holds the Aspern papers and the fetishized portrait, the dead female hand controls property and thereby forces itself into the domain of male bonding. Like the women of The Aspern Papers, the female dead hand droops over art and beauty while the dream of an all-male enclave, a brotherhood of beautiful artists, struggles to emerge from her powerful and ultimately dead hand.

Notes 1. All quotations from The Aspern Papers (except one) from the New York Edition of James. Also see Person for a reading of the story as an exploration of the masculine creative process: “Throughout, [the narrator’s] behavior is consistent with a desire to idealize Aspern and to divorce eroticism and creativity, the letters from their meaning” (Leland Person, “Eroticism and Creativity in The Aspern Papers,” Literature and Psychology 32 [1986]: 23). 2. Tambling sees Walt Whitman as the model for Aspern. Edel reads James’s anxiety about his own letters to Constance Fenimore Woolson into the conception of the story (Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life [New York: Harper & Row, 1985], 339–41), while Scharnhorst sees Julian Hawthorne as embedded in the name “Juliana” and as the “publishing scoundrel” of the story for publishing his own father’s private papers. 3. The National Portrait Gallery has seven portraits of Shelley, including the 1819 Curran oil painting and an oil painting by George Clint, “after Amelia Curran, and Edward Ellerker Williams,” known as the composite portrait (ca. 1829). The Clint painting (http:// w w w.npg.org.u k/ live/sea rch/por t L ist.asp?sea rch-sp& sTextpercy+Shelley) seems like a “better” portrait than Curran’s, with more detail and facial definition. Mary Shelley apparently tried to commission an improved version of the Curran painting in 1829 by requesting a composite of the Curran and Williams portraits. For further information on the Shelley portraits, see Trelawny’s Preface to his Recollections; N. White; R. Smith; and Barker-Benfield.

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4. Claire’s letters to both Percy Shelley and Lord Byron are collected in The Clairmont Correspondence, which also contains the letters related to her years in Italy and sent to her niece Pauline (Plin) Clairmont, the model for Miss Tina. For a full account of Pauline’s life, see Stocking. 5. Edel identifies Claire as the “cousin” of Mary Shelley ( 337). Other misidentifications occur throughout the secondary criticism of The Aspern Papers; e.g., Person identifies Claire as “Shelley’s second wife” (Henry James 30). 6. Shelley’s visit with Allegra at the convent in Bagnacavallo is described in Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 64–65. For a description of Shelley’s attempts to act as a go-between with Claire and Byron over the care of Allegra, see Richard Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit (New York: New York Review of Books, 1994), 420–23, 439–49. And for a full-length biography of Claire, see Glynn R. Grylls, Claire Clairmont: Mother of Byron’s Allegra (London: Murray, 1939). 7. See Holmes (2003), “The Tombs of Naples” (Ch. 18) for an extended and updated discussion of this vexed question. I am grateful to Joshua Wilner who alerted me to Kessel’s thesis, namely that Claire used an “x” to mark her period in her journals, and then concluded that she could not have given birth at the end of February because the entry for March 22 is marked with an X. The most recent, full-length biography of Shelley discusses the mystery of the Neopolitan child at length, concluding that it is impossible now to prove definitively who the biological parents of the girl were (see Bieri 2: Ch. 5: “Paradise of Devils: Naples”). 8. In a similar fashion, Goodman has observed: “James’s love of gossip—justified by the belief that ‘art is long & everything else is accidental and unimportant’—sometimes makes him appear almost ruthlessly detached from other people and their pain. For him, gossip was an art” (Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle [Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994], 61). 9. Bonney MacDonald (Henry James’s “Italian Hours”: Revelatory and Resistant Impressions [Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1989], 80–91) has discussed James’s “Italian Hours” (1909), including his earlier Venetian writings, “Venice” (1882), “The Grand Canal” (1892), and “Two Old Houses and Three Young Women” (1909), all of which convey James’s historical immersion in the themes of The Aspern Papers. Reading Venice as a sexualized locus of meaning, Bradley discusses James’s letter to Symonds as a way of identifying himself as a homosexual by revealing his attraction to the young man he had glimpsed fleetingly in Venice (John R. Bradley, “Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence,” Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley [Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999], 47–48, 53).

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10. See, e.g., Church; Reesman; Veeder; E. Brown; and Hadley for various approaches to the misogyny that is implicit (or explicit) throughout the story. Reesman notes that “the literal is the realm of the female body and the male body is, in contrast, unreachable, undefinable, and unsayable” (Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “ ‘The Deepest Depths of the Artificial’: Attacking Women and Reality in The Aspern Papers,” “The Finer Thread, the Tighter Weave”: Essays on the Short Fiction of Henry James, ed. Joseph Dewey and Brooke Horvath [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001], 43). 11. See Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” for a summary of the psychic dynamics here: To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother. . . . The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. (264) 12. McLean argues that Tina is Aspern’s daughter by Juliana; Harding claims that Tina is Aspern’s daughter by Juliana’s younger sister. As I have suggested, James well may have believed the gossip that Claire had a daughter with Shelley (born in Naples) and who died in infancy. 13. For a discussion of Wharton’s adaptations of the ghost story, see Allan Smith, “Edith Wharton and the Ghost Story,” Gender and Literary Voice, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980).

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Chapter 8

Sh e l l e y I nc i n e r at e d Michael Gamer

Cor Cordium —Leigh Hunt, epitaph composed for Shelley’s tomb in Rome Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest; epitaph inscribed on Shelley’s tomb in Rome by Edward John Trelawny

When Percy Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, he had

just spent several days with Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt in discussions about the content of The Liberal, the periodical to be edited by Hunt. The meetings and discussions about this project had been long anticipated and, for Shelley, were important in more than one way. Shelley had not seen his friend Hunt in over four years; and though negotiations during the days Shelley stayed at Byron’s villa were sometimes ominously prickly, Shelley set sail with Edward Williams on July 8 in an ebullient mood, having finally staged the coup of drawing Hunt to Italy and of assembling an arguably unprecedented group of contributors, including, besides himself, Byron, Hunt, Mary Shelley, and William Hazlitt. Put another way, Shelley’s death was less the culmination of a life1 than a disastrous interruption, uprooting the lives of his dearest friends and derailing plans over a year in execution. The costs of that death are captured starkly in Mary Shelley’s letters and

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journals, in the demise of The Liberal and dissolution of its circle, and in the sheer number of accounts of Shelley’s death narrated by its various members. While The Liberal failed after four numbers, the junta of authors it mobilized did succeed in making another kind of literary history: that of producing a permanent transformation of Shelley’s reputation in the years that followed. Taken as a whole, their writings provide a fascinating snapshot of nineteenth-century print culture and of what Jeffrey Cox has called the communal tendency of Romantic writers to combine themselves and others into distinct camps and coteries (3–8). From Trelawny’s decision to pluck Shelley’s heart from the crematory fire (which at once scorched his hand and produced a quarrel between Mary Shelley and Hunt over who had the greater right to it), to Hunt’s first announcements of Shelley’s death in The Examiner (which produced a firefight in the London press2), to the myriad of accounts of Shelley’s life published over the next decades (themselves the children of such controversies), the task of creating what commentators have called the “Shelley Myth” was a collective effort, frequently contentious but remarkably coherent in purpose and symbolic language. Why begin here, then, with these two epitaphs doing double duty as epigraphs? First, they exemplify that discourse’s characteristic tropes and monumentalizing logic. Dissatisfied with representing Shelley as an organ of feeling, Hunt pushes such synecdochal thinking a step further by representing Shelley not just as a heart but as its quintessence: “Car Cordium” or “Heart of Hearts.” Inscribed on Shelley’s tomb in Rome, Edward John Trelawny’s chosen lines from The Tempest perform a similar act of double-troping on Shelley’s drowning: by presenting death as a seat of metaphorical transformation, and by (punningly) substituting for it other unexpected, transformative, and paradigmatic forms of (“sea”) change.3 Second, however, Shelley’s two epitaphs point to just how early the master tropes of the Shelley Myth began to gather and organize themselves. For while Shelley’s posthumous reputation has fascinated readers for at least a century, literary historians—among them Karsten Engelberg, Mary Favret, Audrey Fisch, Anne Mellor, Marlon Ross, Esther Schor, and Susan Wolfson—have usually looked to the later memoirs of Hunt, Peacock, and Moore, and to the 1839 editions of Shelley’s poetry and prose edited by Mary Shelley, to elucidate its origins and methods. The later excesses of the mythography may be most famously captured in Matthew Arnold’s representation of Shelley as a “luminous angel,” that asexual poet of juvenile politics and disembodied idealism, and in Lady Shelley’s shrine at Boscombe Manor, with its

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“life-size monument of the poet, lockets of fading hair, glass cases of letters and blue opaque pots containing fragments of bone” (Holmes 732); but the myth’s formulation and coherent articulation occurred at the moment of burial, as did the creation of its key relics and tropes. And in producing that unconsumable heart, potent enough to burn hands and inspire quarrels, Shelley’s cremation has long stood at the center of mythmaking about him (Clarke, Lee). My aim in revisiting this scene and unpacking its governing aesthetics, however, is to insist on what I want to call its textual center. By this I mean not just that the literal heart, found at Mary Shelley’s death in her traveling desk wrapped in silk gauze in her copy of Shelley’s Adonais, never strays far from books. Nor do I mean merely that the heart is a textual creation, one so present in the writings of Hunt, Trelawny, and Mary Shelley that modern commentators have felt bemused embarrassment over its actual existence and even real dismay at Sir Percy Florence Shelley’s desire to have it buried with him (Norman 12; Holmes 732; Seymour 232; Clarke 188; Lee 25–26). Influential as the later memoirs and editions were to Shelley’s reputation, they took their cues and presiding aesthetics from texts published in the immediate aftermath of his death. Simply put, Shelley’s heart and incinerated corpse would never have had the power to redefine his reputation had not his executors—particularly his most important editor, Mary Shelley—created early, powerful textual counterparts that anchored and secured the anecdotes of which Shelley’s Victorian readers rarely tired. Thus, I place a single volume, Shelley’s Posthumous Poems of 1824, edited by Mary Shelley, at the center of this process of idealization. For it was in the Posthumous Poems that Mary Shelley presented for the first time a recollected, reconstituted literary corpus—and through it a posthumous portrait of its author—that did not just stand in for the corpse of her husband, but represented him through the essentializing, incinerating logic of his own cremation. Such actions, moreover, were both intentional and unintentional. Comprised primarily of new works but also including previously published poems, the Posthumous Poems functioned at once as opening salvo and stopgap publication. Designed by Mary Shelley, first and foremost, as a corrective to her husband’s negative reputation at the time of his death, the volume also was intended to serve as a temporary placeholder until she could complete her editions of the collected poetry and prose. Needless to say, she could hardly have foreseen the importance the Posthumous Poems was to have. Because of Sir Timothy Shelley’s prohibition on further publication of his son’s writings, Mary Shelley’s

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fuller editions of the poetry and prose did not appear for another fifteen years, and then only after she successfully argued that Sir Timothy’s ban had ironically fomented interest in Shelley’s work by encouraging piracies. By the time of their publication in 1839, no fewer than seven unauthorized editions of Shelley’s works had appeared, nearly all taking significant cues, if not much of their material, from the Posthumous Poems (Taylor). Simply put, Sir Timothy’s ban transformed his son into a reprintable poet, one whose works could be collected and anthologized with little fear of his widow insisting on her own copyright. If nothing else, the Posthumous Poems illustrate the degree to which literary remains can be as problematic as human ones: at once not living and not the beloved; yet once living and of the beloved. As a book it provides a carefully selected and constructed textual portrait of the author, one established, as Neil Fraistat has shown, through its paratexts and general framing. In a Preface that can only be called brilliant, Mary Shelley first acknowledges herself as an unwilling author, wishing that Leigh Hunt could have written a biographical notice. She then presents her husband first as fearless in the sacred cause of improving “the moral and physical state of mankind,” and then, “like other illustrious reformers . . . pursued by hatred and calumny” (iv). Shelley then undergoes a series of transformations in the Preface, largely to give the lie to this public portrait of him as a violent and mad reformer. He is first a devoted friend, then a comet whose “bright vision” has left a “radiant track,” then “an elegant scholar and a profound metaphysician” who spent his life “in arduous study, and in acts of kindness and affection” (iv). Stressing above all things his “love for nature,” Mary next portrays Percy as a godlike reader of the cosmos and of “every production of the earth” (v): this sensitive plant, it seems, is also a namer of them, replete with classical learning and imaginative fancy. Finally, underlining this classical learning and these scholarly pursuits, she presents the Posthumous Poems as a consecrated “monument of his genius” (viii). Her epigraph, from Virgil’s Callus, seals the argument, emphasizing both her own mourning and the mourning of friends: The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme, The goats with the green leaves of budding spring, Are saturated not—nor Love with tears. (n.p.)

That is a pretty formidable piece of framework; but even more striking is the arrangement of the Posthumous Poems themselves, which works in concert with Mary Shelley’s notes to demonstrate, corroborate, and—to the degree it can—“prove” the portrait of her Preface.

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Thus, the Posthumous Poems opens with “Julian and Maddalo,” and the introductory note supplied to that poem works hard to render the poem autobiographical: Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is for ever speculating how good may be made superior. (3–4)

Yet, Mary Shelley’s inclusion of the introductory note also works hard to present Shelley—its apparent author—as at once playful and selfmocking. Thus Julian, it continues, is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy, and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. How far this is possible, the pious reader will determine. Julian is rather serious. (4)

Given that Mary Shelley did not always include her husband’s prefatory materials in the Posthumous Poems—she omits the opening to “The Witch of Atlas,” for example—the inclusion of this passage must constitute an active and interpretive choice, one that typifies the prevailing strategies of selection that govern the volume. Among the reasons why the Posthumous Poems is such an elegant, aristocratic and slim book, its principles of inclusion and exclusion sit most conspicuously and, in my opinion, brilliantly. Thanks to the work of Irvin Massey and the host of scholars who have made the Bodleian Shelley manuscripts available to readers, we know that most of the Posthumous Poems came from Shelley manuscript d. 9. This same notebook opens with complete versions of “The Mask of Anarchy,” “Lines Written during the Castlereagh Administration,” and other poems, none of which make it into the Posthumous Poems. Thus, among Shelley’s published remains, there exists little that is political or satirical—no songs of protest, no “Peter Bell the Third,” no “Swellfoot the Tyrant”—because part of the method of the Posthumous Poems is to make Shelley’s political reputation seem groundless and to portray his political enemies as vicious and gratuitous. But the inclusion of the introductory note to “Julian and Maddalo” does far more, I think, than present a sanitized Shelley,

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more than provide corroboration of the portrait of Mary Shelley’s Preface. It shows a Shelley self-conscious and self-aware of how he has been pilloried and satirized, and shows him above resentment and above retaliation. Instead, it presents a double self, the author gently mocking a burlesqued version of himself in Julian. The poem itself—and “The Witch of Atlas,” which follows itthen show Shelley at his most playful and chattily intertextual. Between them, “Julian and Maddalo” and “The Witch of Atlas” invoke no fewer than five of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, not to mention The Excursion and Peter Bell. They also echo and summon, among other texts, Coleridge’s Christabel and Kubla Khan, Byron’s Giaour, Manfred, Childe Harold, and Don Juan, Plato’s Symposium, and Shelley’s own Mont Blanc and Adonais—all within the landscapes either of Venice’s Lido or the classical fairy-land that hosts “The Witch of Atlas.” Through these opening two poems, the portrait of Shelley that emerges is one of sophistication and imaginative playfulness, a prankster much like the Witch of Atlas herself, along the lines of the poem’s final stanza: These were the pranks she played among the cities Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties To do her will, and shew their subtle slights I will declare another time; for it is A tale more fit for the weird winter nights— Than for these garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see. (55)

Suffice it to say that this portrait continues in the next poem, in the Spenserian, self-consciously referential “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” which comes next in the Posthumous Poems, where Shelley presents himself as fancifully spinning harmless silk—not as a spider, but a silkworm creating bowers of memory and imagination out of the finest, softest stuff, so that: Memory may clothe in wings my living name And feed it with the asphodels of fame, Which in those hearts which most remember me Grow, making love an immortality. (59)

Though this content matters immensely to Mary’s editorial construction of Percy’s posthumous self—not least because here the husband appears to anticipate and authorize her practice—my

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point here is as much about the construction of the volume, which, through its arrangement and omissions, presents an essential Shelley stripped of all unnecessary detritus. This is even true of the previously published poems reprinted in the Posthumous Poems, which Mary Shelley ostentatiously includes because they are out of print. Needless to say, she chooses “Alastor” and “Mont Blanc,” both part of that ethereal, playfully intellectual Shelley that deepens as the volume unfolds, moving through lyrics, songs, and capricious and serious translations from ancient Greek, German, and other languages. If these are literary remains, they are less an embalmed corpse preserved in death than representative fragments serving a dual function. Selected and arranged as both the essence and the source materials of Shelley’s imagination, they stand in not just for Shelley’s corpus but also for those future works he now will never produce. The function of poetic remains perhaps must always differ from that of an authorized collection of poems by a living author. Here, however, the differences between the practice of the Posthumous Poems and that of other poetic collections of the Romantic period lie less in distinctive strategies of authorial representation than in the arguments—or narrative trajectories—they construct through their paratexts and arrangements of poems. To provide one closing example, consider the representational strategies of the Posthumous Poems next to those of a work such as Wordsworth’s 1815 collected Poems. Intentionally diffuse and exhaustively capacious, Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems present its author as very much alive, his life’s work under construction, his road still very much before him. In contrast, the Posthumous Poems provide a more focused and self-consciously finished picture where literary remains, rather than comprising the debris of death, are transformed into precisely what cannot be destroyed by it—a poet fanciful, fragmentary but endlessly fertile, reduced to a single volume and an unconsumable heart.

Notes 1. Harold Bloom famously reads the end of Adonais as both “the sepulcher of a humanist and heroic quest” and as an allegory of Shelley’s “great but suicidal” life in The Visionary Company, 350. Several scholars have shied away from this prophetic reading while further unpacking the poem’s focus on death as constitutive of the poetic self. Among those are Jerold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York and Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 1988), 317–19; Karen A. Weisman, Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994),141–46; and Simon Haines, Shelley’s Poetry: The Divided Self (London: Macmillan; New York. St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 207–29. 2. See The Examiner no. 758 (August 4, 1822), 289; Courier no. 9616 (August 5, 1822), 3, which calls Shelley “the writer of some infidel poetry”; Morning Chronicle no. 16.635 ( August 12, 1822), which prints Leigh Hunt’s letter on the death of Shelley; Morning Chronicle no. 16.637 (August 14, 1822), 2, which censures The Courier, leading to an even stronger response in Courier no. 9.624 (August 14, 1822), 4; John Bull 2 (August 19, 1822), 701, which denounces the Morning Chronicle obituary of Shelley and reprints part of Queen Mab to expose Shelley’s atheism, declaring it offensive that Morning Chronicle “should descend to the insertion of such nauseating nonsense as this eulogium upon Mr Shelley’s friendship for the universe”; British Luminary and Weekly Intelligencer, no. 203 (August 18, 1822), 685, which ridicules the commentary of John Bull; The Republican 6 (August 23, 1822), 283, which characterizes Shelley as “unfortunately too well known for his infamous novels and poems”; Monthly Magazine 54 (September 1822), 178, which praises Shelley as a “man of highly cultivated genius”; and New European Magazine 1 (September 1822), 194, which praises Shelley’s talents but declares his poems to embody horrifying “fiend-like principles.” 3. The fullest account of the events and texts produced by Shelley’s death remains Leslie A. Marchand, “Trelawny on the Death of Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 4 (1952): 9–34.

Chapter 9

K e at s a n d t h e I m pe r sona l C r a f t of Wr i t i ng Magdalena M. Os tas

Keats’s Objects and the Visual Idiom It has been characteristic of most commentary on Keats since Leigh Hunt described The Eve of St. Agnes in 1820 as a “picture” rather than a “story” to take recourse to some form to the language of the visual—painting, sculpture, particularly the genre of ekphrasis, and cinema (Matthews 172). While there are numerous studies investigating the lines of influence between Keats and the visual arts, the inclination to draw the parallel between Keats’s style and the various visual media is actually more fundamental and transpires almost inevitably and repeatedly in criticism.1 In addition to being filled with passing descriptions of and references to “tableaus” or “stills” in the poems, criticism on Keats often also makes recourse to the visual at the level of thesis. Christopher Ricks, for instance, writes of Keats’s “scopophilia”; Marjorie Levinson of his writing in “word-pictures”; Charles Rzepka of the “statuesque” quality of his figures; Jerome McGann of the way “To Autumn,” for instance, aspires to “pictorial silence”; Geoffrey Hartman of “frames” in the ode; Michael O’Neill of Keats’s “poetic cinema”; Helen Vendler regularly of “friezes” in all of the Odes; and Grant Scott of the way in which the genre of ekphrasis eventually becomes indistinguishable from Keats’s style and poetic point of view itself (Ricks 89; Levinson, Allegory 143; Rzepka 231; McGann 59; Hartmann, “Poem and Ideology” 130; O’Neill 117;

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Scott xiv). There are, furthermore, famous moments in Keats’s verse captured in contemporary criticism in specifically visual idioms: the long, slow “pan” that commences Hyperion; “cuts” that punctuate The Eve of St. Agnes; and “tableaus” that decorate the Grecian urn. In other words, speaking of pictures seems aptly to capture something about the way Keats writes in images. Words for Keats take on the form of visual objects. My intention in the following analysis of the Odes of 1819 and Keats’s late lyrical style—what I term his “impersonal” craft of writing throughout—is to account for the draw toward the visual idiom in Keats’s criticism and attempt to bring its critical significance outside of the language of the visual. I show why Keats’s poetics draws what critics instinctively import as a “visual” idiom, one often left unaccounted for and made to do descriptive rather than critical work. I aim to show, then, that the intuitive recourse to the “visual” in Keats’s criticism stems from the unique grammar of enunciation and representation in Keats’s verse. One stands before—apprehends or comprehends—Keats’s text as one stands before a certain kind of picture: Keats recasts, in other words, a logic or a grammar of reading. Keats’s verse can read “visually” because it lacks the “depth” of a speaking or enunciating persona. In the Odes of 1819, Keats consistently employs—uses—rather than “expressing in” signs. He uses them as always conscious material, manipulates them. Keats employs words as words rather than expressions. Keats’s grammar of enunciation is thus never tied to a first-person persona or self of utterance, is never “deep,” and I hope to bring out several aspects of the critical significance of this style of writing, the logic of subjectivity that it embodies, and the decidedly late moment in the Romantic tradition that it articulates. Very generally, the inclination to draw the parallel between Keats’s poetry and the visual arts stems instinctually from three characteristic marks of Keats’s poetic style that are indeed—descriptively, that is“pictorial.” First, the inclination to speak of Keats’s scenes as being painted, rendered, or often recorded rather than “written” comes from his tendency to slow down and even explicitly stall narrative movement in favor of what is sometimes called “slow time” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”)—the poet’s persisting, “lingering” (“I stood tiptoe upon a link hill”), and “loitering” (“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”) within images and scenes. As Andrew Bennett has put the point, Keats’s poems are frequently “overwhelmed by the absence of generative narrative energies” (Bennett 65). To call to mind the effect of

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the utter slowness of narrative time in some of Keats’s verse, we might recollect Hyperion’s slow-moving, deliberate opening pan: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad ‘mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips. (1–14)

or reflect on one of the immovable images on the Grecian urn, which refuses to yield to what hovers as the immanent resumption of temporal advance: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou cast not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (15–20)

The sensuousness of Keats’s imagery coupled with this still, sloweddown, or even retreating form of narrative progression often leads to the impression that the poetic persona has “halted” in some sense and surrendered entirely to the scene before it—the chameleon poet relinquishing identity to immerse unreservedly into an image or scene. Keats’s is a form of immersion or identification that forward motion actually appears to threaten. Thus the frequent resulting impression is of a precariously stilled “scene.” Keats, in this way, resists narrative progression. Second, Keats’s images often suggest the visual idiom because they are always grounded in the material, external, and outward characteristics of their forms. Alan Richardson calls this an “objective exactness” in Keatsian imagery and points out in a revealing example that Keats is one of the first, for instance, to use the word “brain” to signify “mind” or “thought” and that, in this way, Keats’s images

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signify consciousness by the sensible and tangible body (Richardson, “Romantic Science” 233–35).2 Likewise, feelings and emotions in the Keatsian image, as if literally indistinguishable from the body itself, always appear as symptoms, things “seen” and discernible only from an external gaze. Here we might think of Keats’s abundant images of flushes, colors, trembles, and glances—always instead of the language of states, feelings, or emotions. The “breathing human passion,” “burning forehead,” and “parching tongue” of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” exemplify this tendency to couch states of consciousness in the sensuous, external, sometimes clinical imagery of affect and symptom. They are beheld from the outside—not internal disquiet but a burning forehead. Keats’s imagery in this way is not only “sensuous” but also unfolds as if the poetic sensibility were only coming into contact with external, worldly surfaces and forms. Things in Keats’s poems are things seen (or heard, or tasted, or touched). They show their insides. Finally, critics often invoke cinema and the genre of ekphrasis in parallel with Keats’s style because Keats’s poetic persona constitutively maintains his diegetic invisibility—even, as we will see, in the lyrics. Keats maintains the sensuality and intensity of his imagery always at a hovering distance from it. That sensuality is never “his” but always as if “out there.” The Keatsian poetic persona, when apprehending an image, does not come forward to confront or meet that image. Syntactically or formally, this means that Keats’s surrender to the image, the entering of the chameleon poet into the object before it, rarely transpires in the mode of the first person. Like a camera or ekphrastic eye, then, Keats’s “I” or even narratorial persona are not personalized agencies in viewing, seeing, and apprehending. The sense often, then, is not that the poetic voice or persona apprehends something but rather that something is being seen from an unembodied, impersonal locality. We can recollect here, for instance, Keats’s construction of the tableaus on the Grecian urn, the ode whose very theme is the final impenetrability or over-there-ness of the poet’s own images and his distance from them. The poetic persona marks the images’ inaccessibility at both the beginning and conclusion of the ode by underlining their silence (“foster-child of silence,” “silent form”) for him. They do not let him in. His initial questioning and curiosity are unable to carry him into these images—and in the end the urn is “cold.” They are for him thus perceptible but finally qua images impenetrable—marble. The structure of the ode can be grasped precisely as the I’s alienated struggle with the inaccessibility of its own representations. Keats’s “self”—or what in lyricism reads

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as the self or “I”—cannot come forward. The loss or dissolution of subjectivity and the diegetic invisibility of the poetic persona, the loss of the particularity from which something is viewed or apprehended, is thus consistently constitutive of the Keatsian image.3 The resulting effect is that Keats’s poetic eye hovers about his scenes, maintaining a proximate, almost-there distance to its material. What critics call the visual quality of Keats’s poetry, however, is not just a function of the characteristic Keatsian constructions of narrative time, narrative perspective, and image—all instinctual associations with the structure or ontologies of the visual media. Rather, Keats’s “visualness” is a function of the form of Keats’s text more broadly conceived. For to say as Leigh Hunt did that The Eve of St. Agnes is a picture and not a story is not to say that it includes within it vivid or sensuous images or that its narrative progression is measured but rather to say that the poem is like a picture, that reading it is like apprehending a (certain kind of) picture. In short, that quality of Keats’s text that so instinctively calls up the visual idiom must be understood in terms that extend beyond the instinctive characterizations of Keats’s verse as slow-moving and sensuous. How does one write, for instance, in tableaus and stills? How is a poem like a picture?

Late Keats and the Question of Tone There is a strong connection between what critics call the “cinematic” imagery in Keats’s poetry and the details of Stanley Cavell’s meditations on the ontology of cinema in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. For one of the questions that lingers about the obviously anachronistic characterization of Keats’s imagery as “cinematic” is what cinematic can mean outside or without the context of cinema: what is the structure of apprehension that the parallel wants to conjure? The absent or displaced yet maintained perspective of the one watching or recording is here at issue—its impersonality, in other words. Descriptions of Cavell’s such as the following, for instance, of the relationship specific to cinema between artwork and spectator and the economy of apprehension that the medium’s ontology therefore calls for can read as descriptions of many moments so characteristic of Keats’s poetic eye: To say that we wish to view the world itself is to say that we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such. That is our way of establishing our connection with the world: through viewing it, or having views of

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it. Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self. (Cavell 102)4 Or: [In cinema] I am not present at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb. (Cavell 26)

To follow the analogy, then: like the cinematic camera, Keats’s poetic perspective looks at its subjects not through or with the self, but as if from behind it. The structure of apprehension that the parallel between Keats’s style and cinema wishes to conjure stems from Keats’s desire for what Cavell here calls “the condition of viewing as such,” a condition unanchored to something like a “subjective” perspective and in which the subjective particularly of the viewing position precisely dissolves. In this way, Keats’s grammar of enunciation, like a cinematic image, is dislodged from a structure originating or emanating from a first person, but is one that nonetheless retains an absent “perspective”—not a persona but a moving, emphatically de-personalized site from which language and image spring. The perspective does not entail confrontation with or confirmation of what comes before it but rather unfolds as a kind of fixed absorption. While we should take the parallel between Keats’s characteristic poetic perspective and cinema neither literally nor too fixedly, some of Cavell’s further insights into the ontology of apprehension in film are worth evoking if only because they can help distinguish the specific character of Keats’s characteristic distanced poetic eye from something like a hovering “omniscience.” Cavell argues, for example, that the economy of watching in the cinema requires that the actors “be present” to the spectator while the spectator cannot be present to the actors (Cavell 25). The film must call for the spectator’s absorption and dramatize that it unfolds without that spectator. Keats’s poetic images similarly, rather than issuing “from” him, often are actually present to him or before him; they appear to be something happening to the poet, in other words. The question is both of control and origination. It is as if his images continually exceed or outrun whatever can be construed as the poetic persona and thus unfold outside of him. The image in Keats’s verse appears always to be able to disappear or dissolve at any moment (thus “cuts”)—this threat or sense of liminality is part of its effect—since the poetic persona appears rhetorically and psychologically uncertain of its role in ensuring its maintenance. The imagination is as if independent of the persona. The persona therefore often feels himself

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instead to be the image’s subject. Exceedingly vivid and sensuous as they are, Keats’s images stand without subjective investment. Their sensuousness might be read as the literary effort to keep them there. They unfold and unravel with their own momentum and in their own world, a world the persona often appears to be “watching.” Keats’s 1819 odes are filled with “cuts” such as the following from the “Ode to a Nightingale,” which in its use of tense typifies (“Away! Away! . . . Already with thee!”) and in its reference to the agent of flight as the “wings of Poesy” also in fact thematizes the way in which Keats’s poetic persona can become subject to or of rather than being author of his own image and poem: Away! Away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! . . . (31–35)

The jarring “Already” here marks the first person’s literal moving with the poem, as if that poem’s progression and its language were independent of him; he literally arrives to the nightingale with the inscription of the word. The poem, diegetically, is the agent of flight. We might think here also of the mirroring between stanzaic and thematic rhythm in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each consecutive tableau brings the poetic persona to an increasingly frenzied state only for the urn to turn with each stanza to a subsequent scene. Here, the poet’s affective entry into each scene might be said to outrun the poem’s regular meter and stanza form. The poetic persona is not “done” at each tenth line, and his very turn to a new scene and new stanza must be read diegetically within the psychology of the ode to come out of either agitation or the search for relief. Internally, each stanza grows progressively more desperate, so that the poem qua structure can be said to save, relieve, or coerce the poet as each new stanza commences. Stanzaic, poetic form does not quite capture or hold affect in this poem, and the persona thus watches himself in the poem grow more frenzied. What the parallel between Keatsian imagery and cinema reveals here is that the image’s disavowal of or disengagement from the poetic persona, its dramatization of its independence, is not always or not only in Keats’s verse a matter of general pathos—as it is, most clearly, at the conclusion of the nightingale ode—but also a matter of the structure of poetic progression and enunciation. In this way, the sense is as if Keats often watches his own poetry unfold, as if it moves outside or without him. His images

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are often—thematically and rhetorically—present to him while “he” is, strangely, not present to them. The imagination is severed almost entirely from subjectivity in Keats’s verse. The theme of the status or sustainability of the image or of the imagination more generally plays itself out in Keats’s work of course not only rhetorically but also thematically and allegorically. Keats’s central figures famously abandon the poet, “cheat” him (“Ode to a Nightingale”), “tease” him (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), or “cut” without his will. Many of Keats’s poems stage precisely moments or trances of absorption or enthrallment by an “image” and end almost always in questioning, abandonment, or deliberate suspension. The imagination’s independence from subjectivity, in other words, is precisely a central theme for Keats. That both Keats’s nightingale and urn very much “happen to” the poetic persona is the very topic, for example, of both odes. Their status as images of an imaginative meeting cannot be sustained, and the encounter leads the poetic persona to the disillusioned Keatsian thematization of the status of imagination (“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”). Likewise, the circular temporality and the indeterminability of events in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” allegorizes the poet’s own ailing and woe about imaginative visions. Like the poetic persona at the conclusion of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” who stands stranded like Ruth in a field of alien corn, the knight at the ballad’s conclusion too abruptly has been abandoned by his own image and left ailing. The later Keats takes up precisely the theme of the status and origination of imaginative imagery as his almost singular topic. The Keatsian image is thus dislodged from the classic first person almost entirely—in rhetoric, poetic structure, and allegorically in theme. One of the consequences that Cavell draws out of this sense of feeling unseen and watching in the theater—to draw out one final analogy—with images “happening to” or happening outside oneself in this way, is that subjectivity comes to be thoroughly synonymous with spectatorship, a position that for Cavell is endemic to modernity generally. In such a position of spectatorship, self-consciousness consequently becomes synonymous with embarrassment (Cavell 93). To feel seen watching in this way—fixedly, unreservedly gazing without subjective affective response or investment—is to be embarrassed, for this kind of indiscrete absorbed gaze betrays a lack of basic orientation in one’s position. Rather than acting or responding as one should, one just “looks”—scopophilia. Christopher Ricks analogously draws the connection between the absorbed “nonaversion of the eyes” in

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Keats’s verse and the characteristic early Keatsian “adolescent” gaze with a position of easy embarrassability—what he terms an overtly “blushing” poetic vantage point (Ricks 9, 102–3). Both Cavell and Ricks trace the source of embarrassment in such a position to a lack of certainty about or the inability to orient oneself in one’s social present—adolescent awkwardness, in other words. Blushing, then, is an acknowledgment of sociality without the assurance or authority of a proper, decorous, or fixed social orientation. And Keats’s poetic perspective as it watches itself unfold frequently “blushes” at its own conscious poetic indiscretions, allowances, and even blunders. It is a mode of writing that at every step thereby marks its own knowledge of the proper bounds of aesthetic and literary form, and thus also at times holds up rather than simply executing its own literary achievements. Keats thus of course famously puts his own years of blush-filled apprenticeship sometimes painfully openly on display. This unselfconsciously self-conscious style, though almost unanimously associated only with the early Keats, as we will see continues forcefully into the later works. The presentation or “grammar” of subjectivity is therefore different in Keats’s poetry from that of any other Romantic’s—whether a Wordsworthian spontaneous firstperson lyricism or a Byronic irony. His is a unique Romanticism, at once unironic yet almost entirely unhinged from the enunciative first person of lyric. Whether Keats’s relationship to the linguistic sign should be characterized as fetishistic, indulgent, inventive, self-conscious, or simply sensuous, words for Keats in any case are like objects. They lack depth. They exceed “him” or come to him from the outside. Keats does not own a language; he manipulates it. In the same way, then, that the ontology of the cinematic image entails the spectator’s absorbed displacement from within the image, the formal workings of Keats’s language necessitate a mode of reading or apprehension that is at once absorbed and distanced—absorbed by the sign or image, yet distanced from its employment as spontaneously attached to an expressive subjectivity or as “naturally” literary. Keats’s verse forces meaning out of the linguistic sign in order to fix the locus of meaning instead on the employment of the sign as a sign. It uses it as material. Like a certain kind of image, it is thus perceptible, visible but in a style as estranged, of a double-consciousness, alienated, inauthentic, or performative. What is needed instead is an analysis of its specific formal structures and workings as well as their implications for late Romanticism’s taking up in the form of poetry questions of subjectivity, form, history, and aesthetics.

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That Keats’s characteristic literary forms in this sense serve as an instructive contrast to Wordsworth’s explicitly spontaneous program for poetry is important for conceptualizing the shift in the relationship between literary form and affect from the early to the later Romantic period. As Thomas Pfau has put the point, “The Keatsian text disestablishes the claims of an earlier romantic paradigm of literature as originality in a timeless, inalienable and socially beneficial type of affective experience” (Pfau 365). If the rhetorical success of Wordsworth’s poetry had pivoted on the phenomenalization of the voice in the text as a human voice; on the strong, inalienable identification of the lyrical “I” with the poetic persona; on Wordsworth as a man speaking in the verbal language of the everyday to other men; Keats’s literary forms later hinge, as Pfau here underlines, precisely on the undoing of this paradigm—on its questioning, disillusion, and historical unfeasibility. Language for Keats never functions—not even in the high lyrical form of the ode—as a repository of affect. Like the world, allegorically, for his poetic persona, language is never a “habitat” for Keats. Keats’s late lyricism, then, is characterized by an insistent materiality and indulgence in imagery and language—the attentiveness and adherence of a perspective—and the absence of what might be called the responsiveness or engagement of the poetic voice to that material—a depersonalization of the site from which language and image originate. Keats’s use of language always exceeds, undermines, or mismatches whatever can be construed diegetically as the emergence of a poetic persona. Language runs into subjectivity in the verse; the poetry’s progression is often the drama of the always failed attempt to take on voice. Keats’s poems, in other words, lack tone; put differently, one might say that their structure is a composite of tones, that is, tones cited as tones and signs issued as signs and never properly, convincingly inflected.5 Most recently, Thomas Pfau has termed this quality of Keats’s mode of writing “serialized,” and Marjorie Levinson speaks of Keats’s unnatural relationship to language as “willfully alienated articulation.” She thus terms Keats’s an “aggressively literary” style while Pfau terms it an “anti-literary” one (Pfau 312, 315; Levinson, Allegory 105–6). These contemporary revaluations of Keats force us to bear in mind that the quality of self-consciousness so characteristic of the early, awkward, overtly “blushing” Keats very well continues into the later works but in more formally complex and less self-professed ways. This is rarely thought to be the case. These reassessments undermine, in other words, the oft-told narrative of Keats’s short life as one of a

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young, awkward poet in the end growing into a proper, full Romantic lyrical voice in the late works of 1819. That the early Keats is a series of strangely self-assigned trials in poetic vocation, ill-at-ease simulations, movements through genres and forms as if through garments tried on, is well established in the critical literature. Keats’s displaced relationship to the literary tradition and to the construction of the aesthetic, however, is consistent throughout his poetic career. The Odes of 1819, however, are most often read precisely with the assumption—explicit or not—that Keats there finally does find something like an authentic poetic “voice” and persona.6 I hope to show that Keats’s achievement in these late poems lies in the construction of a uniquely “impersonal” lyricism. The form of the ode, too, will prove especially important in my analysis, for if the mark of the Keatsian mode of enunciation is indeed a hovering distance from its linguistic material and a renunciation of the first person of utterance, the pressing question will be of course how Keats writes or manages an ode, a genre whose very organization depends on the coherence and conviction of the first-person lyrical voice.

High Lyricism without Voice: Odes and Absent Speakers If we are to take consequentially the thesis that Keats’s mode of writing entails the renunciation of utterance as “deep” or as expressive, we have to begin by throwing out most commonplaces about the Odes of 1819 as well as the commonplace that an ode’s constitution is determined by the valences of the first-person lyrical voice. Rather than conceiving of them as accomplished odes, we must conceptualize Keats’s Odes of 1819 as Keats’s attempts at odes, that is, his thematization through the ode form of the possibilities and constraints of odal and lyric structure—his attempt to arrive at rather than simply to write what is to be an ode. Rather than with lyrical pathos, they must read as Keats’s meditations and commentaries on lyricism. Keats’s odes, then, are no less unaccomplished than his epics, the only difference being that formally the lyrics are complete, and they do end. Still, in the same way that Endymion and both Hyperion poems are about what Martin Aske calls the necessary failure of epic in the modern, and in the same way that the very form of these poems is determined by uncertainty about what epic is to look like—the lack of grounding in theme, form, and progression—the odes are structured, first, by the need to arrive at or constitute the traditional object of the ode and, second, by a reflection on a poetics grounded in the

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voice as its structuring and defining principle. Keats takes for granted neither the object nor the subjective centering of an ode. As in the epics, then, in the odes Keats “is confronted with bare circumstance which he must fill with poetry,” in this case not event, narrative, and movement but voice (“voice”) and object (Aske 88). Keats thus fills the odes with “voice”—with medium. Language, rather than having the function of expression, subsumes the “I” of utterance in Keats’s odes. Rather than unfolding in verse, therefore, the “I” and the presumed consciousness or utterance instead watches itself unravel in these lyric poems, watches over and worries about its own constitution through its medium. Keats’s “I” is the subject of or the subject within his lyrics; language carries the “I” of utterance along in these texts. Vacillations of consciousness watch Keats’s odes unfold rather than being dramatized by the odes themselves as in traditional lyric. The speaker of these odes arrives at no medium that he expresses as “his”; the odes are not lyrical. Qua odes, then, Keats’s Odes of 1819 are attempts to arrive at and achieve odal form and pathos. The trajectory of the odes is an effort to take on voice—to rouse from “silence” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”) or “drowsy numbness” (“Ode to a Nightingale”). The “taking on of voice” necessary for the traditional movement of an ode, wherein an object is invoked, addressed, and celebrated, is instead in these texts a brief and frenzied achievement. Each of the Odes of 1819 can be read as the attempt of the poet to find rather than to expound in the vocative. And each breaks under this pressure at the very moment of achievement. Read as cadences of a vocal center, the odes thus unfold as psychological fret and intense self-estrangement rather than celebration and its gradual amplification. Keats’s odes structurally and rhetorically cannot sustain the “self-present” intensity of a lyrical first person. Perhaps with the exception of the “Ode to Psyche,” Keats’s odes also cannot sustain or cannot achieve the invocation of the object that usually marks the form of the ode. Neither the urn nor the nightingale—neither art nor nature—allows the poet entry enough to sustain a chorus of vocal address or meeting. Each object is shut off, and as readers we are as shut out from it as our poetic persona is. Keats’s objects trouble and haunt rather than abide in his odes. The objects even appear to reprimand the poet’s curiosity (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”) or his desire for identification and celebration (“Ode to a Nightingale”). Thematically, therefore, each ode fails to become a proper ode and each dwells with and experiences this failure. Thematically, then, every ode, particularly the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” dwells on the impossibility of a full

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or actual meeting with or evocation of its object. Rather than by excess, Keats’s odes are characterized by impossibility. His odes fail at evocation, celebration, and even at address. The ode fails to constitute or to arrive at or to its object, and each is thus structured in theme and in rhetoric as the experience of a failure. The nightingale leaves the poet forlorn, and the urn in the end is marble and cold. The “Ode to a Nightingale” commences in what would appear to be a simple or naive first person: “My heart aches . . . ” (1). The line would seem to situate our poetic persona as speaking with an unproblematic first-person lyrical voice. Indeed, Helen Vendler terms Keats’s mode of enunciation here confessional and contends that Keats’s assertion is simply a statement of personal feeling—a declaration of personal heartache (Vendler, Odes 97). Yet as Susan Wolfson elegantly has shown, Keats’s beginning strangely has the effect of precisely removing the personal sense of immediacy. Because it makes reference to what is a transpersonal, representative, generically lyrical emotion, the line, she notes, does not actualize its potential personal reference and tap “unspecified depths in a self behind the ‘I’ ” but instead signifies a representative state of emotion and desire (Wolfson, Questioning Presence 203). “My heart aches” might in this sense be understood to signify lyrical pathos as lyrical pathos. It is where lyricism can and usually does begin—my heart aching. The line, however, manages to drain the sense that our poetic persona has meant it—it has been drained not of meaning but of personal meaning—because it announces and publicizes that sense of feeling so loudly, openly, and declaratively. Rather than as confession, it reads as a citation of the declaration of lyrical feeling. Neither the metrical nor the semantic weight falls on the “My” but rather on the general and nearly generic state of “heart ache.” The “Ode to a Nightingale” thus begins forcefully as “lyricism.” Keats begins with a bold citation of lyricism as such and thus a boldly impersonal “My.” There is an attempt here to constitute or interject lyrical pathos, which reads as decidedly crafted or “literary” and not actualized. Keats here is orchestrating lyric. The conclusion of the first stanza and whole of the second stanza of the poem, furthermore, make clear that the cause of the poet’s general heartache is his distantiation from the object before him, the object of our ode—the nightingale. The ode aches as unconsummated ode; it aches because it senses the distance between itself and its object. The emotional and empathetic arc of the poem is tied solely to this measure of distance between the two figures. The nightingale has the ability to sing in what the poet calls “full-throated

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ease” (10) or a “pouring forth” (57), contrasted with his own selfestranged voice. Both stanzas thus unfold in theme as an exposition of the distance between the “I” and the “thou”—the immortal “too happy . . . happiness” (6) of the bird and the poet’s world of “weariness,” “fever,” and “fret” (23). A true identification between the two figures, however, would entail an overcoming of the poet’s own self-estranged voice, a “fad[ing] away” (20) and “dissolv[ing]” (21) of self-consciousness. Rather than in sound or tone, the dissolution of subjectivity and merging of “I” and “thou” in the poem is staged entirely in terms of the senses of sight and touch. The poet stands, at the moment that he manages a coming to and identification with the nightingale, in a synaesthetic “embalmed darkness” (43), amidst “soft incense” (42), grass, fruit-tress, violet, hawthorn, and “the coming musk-rose” (49). “I” and “thou” cannot be merged in tone. Even at the moment of identity and the blurring between “I” and “thou,” the poet still perceives difference between himself and the nightingale. The bird can sing (“pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!” [57–81]) in a way he cannot and which continues to inspire envy. The poet measures the self-division of his own voice against the nightingale’s ability to pour forth in full-throated ease. Both climactic moments in the “Ode to a Nightingale” are staged not in theme or in terms of the relationship between object and speaker but in the texture of the language itself. They are literal “happenings” at the surface of the poetry. Precisely in its most consequential movements, the poem has the highest, almost surreal consciousness and memory of itself and its own language. Both moments in which the poetic persona is moved transpire when he apprehends and retrospectively identifies with his own written word, when he hears and apprehends his own poem, in other words, within the poem. The words of the poem itself diegetically take on a determining agency within the movement of the text, that is, within the struggle to reach the nightingale. First, the poem literally carries our persona to the bird, the moment of identification and inward flight marked with the words “Already with thee!”: Away! Away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night. (31–5)

Bate calls this a feat of “poetic supernaturalism,” as the language of the text literally brings the poetic persona to the bird (Bate 499).

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No other thematic, structural, or rhetorical agency is involved in the achievement of the great moment of identification than these words. Simply, with their inscription, the poet already is there. His identification with that “Already” determines it to be the case within the poem. The dramatic effect of the exclamation is made stronger by the preceding three stanzas that enumerate and expound the poet’s sense of distance and estrangement from the bird. They read as a catalog (“as though” marks the beginning of the imaginative sequence in the poem’s second line) of the ways in which the distance between the two, “I” and “thou,” can be measured and of the ways that distance is registered in the poetic consciousness. Thematically or structurally, there is no indication in the text that the distance has been bridged or has begun to be bridged. In fact, the poetic persona verbally gestures to the bird to physically fly further: “Away! Away!” (31). Simply, then, “Already with thee!” It is written before it happens. The inscription of the feeling diegetically precedes its actualization in the poem. The poem is allowed to take on an agency of its own in relation to the poetic “I.” The poetic persona brings himself to the nightingale “on the viewless wings of Poesy” (33) through a retrospective identification with his own exclamatory utterance. Similarly, the poetic persona’s own utterance causes him to fall out of identification with the bird and halts his trancelike state: Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 8 Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! (69–72)

Here, the poem both cites and hears itself within itself. The word “forlorn” momentarily is drained of meaning and emerges as a deus ex machina (“Forlorn!”) as sheer sonorous and literary material: “like a bell.”7 The poetic persona here splits in relation to his own utterance; his own word tolls him back from the bird to himself. It is not the semantic heaviness of the word—to be “forlorn”—that brings the poet back to despair (his “sole” self [72]) and confusion (“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” [79]). Rather, his language in that moment stands exposed as mere “word” (71) next to what had been hailed as the bird’s self-same (65) (transpersonal, transhistorical, extralinguistic) “voice” (63) or, later, “music” (80). To the extent that the bird itself had been identified solely with the sense of sound, so that the poet only “listen[s]” (51) to it and does not see it, the bird’s

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own voice might be seen as allegorical in the text of odal potentiality. The nightingale is lyrical, the poet has words: “thou singest of summer” with ease (10), he writes. (Keats will only sing of Autumn with ease.) Its song is an “anthem” (75) or “high requiem” (60); the bird precisely composes in lyric forms. Unlike the poet, the nightingale sings in the vocative. Voice is identified with the bird; language with the poet. In these ways, Keats’s poetic persona avowedly—in theme and in rhetoric, in this text—does not inhabit his language. In the “Ode to a Nightingale,” particularly Keats’s first person and his vocative exclamations do not sustain a transparently lyrical “I” identified with the first person of utterance and with the poetic persona. Like the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” commences in a place Tilottama Rajan has termed “anterior to beginning” (Rajan 335): “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness” (1). The opening line of the ode might be read as a poetic synopsis of the traditional workings of odal movement and structure itself: a “thou,” implicitly an “I,” and the desire for a movement toward figured here as giving voice and as violation are all here already thematized. The giving of voice to the object traditionally undertaken in an ode— here marked with the urn’s initial “quietness,” in the second line by her “silence”—is figured as ravishing, a verb that already suggests the action’s utter difficulty for the poet, so much so as to have to elicit violence. It also suggests the impenetrability or unyielding of the object before him. Nothing here has been “begun” but the confession of the desire to write. The ode begins by thematizing the very force and the structure of desire that marks it as an ode. Consciousness in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not figured in the medium of a “voice” of utterance—the ode, in fact, is written without use of the first person—but appears instead at the level of a struggle between the hovering poetic persona and his linguistic medium. Keats is at all times writing and crafting and never uttering, as we have seen, in all of the odes; they do not “break” into lyric. Rather, they break under the pressure of lyricism. Even in the first person, as we have noted, the odes’ register is never confessional. Instead, both the “Ode to a Nightingale” (stanza 8) and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (stanza 3) contain moments in which Keats’s dense, literary, wrought style breaks into a common, more vocal one characterized by an eased sense of cadence and particularly by repetition and exaggerated exclamation. In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as momentum mounts and the persona begins to identify with the figures on the urn and think himself into the scene, his language feels the pressure of enunciation and cannot bear it. The sense of the poetic persona’s

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control over his literary materials is lost and the effect is that the verse reads symptomatically, as if literally registering a pressure that it cannot contain—frantic, frenetic, speech-like writing. At exactly the moment that the poetic persona identifies most deeply with his object and threatens to move into odal or lyrical pathos, the dense characteristic Keatsian literariness with which the text begins undoes itself and the language registers instead a psychological and rhetorical stress—the pressure of or toward “expression” that results in stuttering or near babble: Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever hid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever panting and for ever young; (21–27)

At the moment when the ode feels most pressure, structurally, to “break” into the vocative, it breaks instead into literary struggle or delirium—a wrestling with its medium. Keats cannot write in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in the vocative except to address the urn as either “silent” or “cold.” Keats can only write “anterior” to odal pathos and structure, can only find voice to address the urn prior to the moment of celebration and identification. The fact that the third stanza of the poem, famously characterized by rampant repetitiveness and such un-Keatsian, unstylized, babble-like lines as “More happy love! more happy, happy love!” (25), has been either passed over by formalist critics or has been seen as a mistake in an otherwise properly wrought poem testifies to the way in which the registers of Keats’s “literariness” can work to register modes of consciousness. That poetic control is lost in this stanza is undisputed. Consciousness in Keats’s text thus always appears as the symptom of the poetic persona’s relationship to his poetic medium and art. In the vocal and vocative register in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” our poetic persona is precisely most fretful and self-estranged.

Conclusion: Late Keats and Poetic Form Keats does not finally “grow” into a properly full poetic voice in the Odes of 1819—a working truism of Keats criticism that both casts the early works as self-conscious experiments in form and the late works as mature poetry. That quality of the early verse that critics often cast

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as derivative or citational—trying genres and forms “on,” it is said— manifests itself in these late works in more formally complex ways. Keats, as we have seen, attempts rather than achieving odal form and pathos—the movement of attempt gives his odes their structure—just as he more obviously attempts epic and romance. Keats’s late works, like his early, are unable to sustain a transparent narratorial or lyrical “I.” Their structure might be read as the symptom of this struggle. To the extent that Keats’s maturity is identified with a form of enunciation affectively “his,” the late works are precisely not mature but instead frenzied. Keats’s lyrical modes of utterance in these late works do not issue according to a grammar of “subjectivity.” Instead, they unfold at the surface, pulled along and given form by the weight of the materiality of their language and the always impersonal avowed desire to write.

Notes 1. For studies of Keats’s relationship to the visual arts, see especially Grant Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1994) and Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). I would like to thank Toril Mai and Thomas Pfau for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 2. On the relationship between Keatsian imagery and physicality, see also particularly Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), who writes, for instance, “His body seemed to think; and, on the other hand, he sometimes appears hardly to have known whether he possessed ought but a body” (198). 3. While there are numerous ways to conceptualize or reason what “loss of self” means here, I find Charles Rzepka’s formulation of the point particularly useful in this context. Because Rzepka’s understanding of Keatsian dissolution centers on the temporality of the presentation of self in the text, it proves an especially suggestive contrast to, e.g., a Wordsworthian construction of selfhood. Charles Rzepka writes of Keats: “There are for the mind no ‘last’ nor ‘next,’ past nor future moments of consciousness in which the awareness of the present moment can inhere and be recognized as a part of the ‘self’ that is aware. That ‘self’ has already faded from its own view, until all that exists is the pure percept, outside of time, unlocalized”(The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 175). 4. Compare, e.g., the sentiment Cavell calls here the wish “for the condition of viewing as such” (The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film [New York: Viking Press, 1971], 102) with Charles Rzepka’s comment that Keats’s is “the effort of the imagination to

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capture the world as it is when no one is there to disturb it” (The Self as Mind, 171). 5. On this point, see also Marjorie Levinson, who argues that “to ‘overhear’ Keats is to hear nothing but intonation, to feel nothing but style and its meaningfulness” (Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style [Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1988], 36); Richard Macksey, who writes of Keats’s “eagerness to be other than the voice of a distinctive personality” and dissolve into other poets in the same way that the poetry yearns thematically for dissolution into another (“ ‘To Autumn’ and the Music of Mortality,” Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984], 276); and Charles Rzepka, who writes of Keats’s “most enthusiastically and originally derivative” style (The Self as Mind, 185). 6. See, e.g., John Barnard’s representative comment that while Keats is centrally concerned with audience in the narrative poetry, the Odes of 1819 are “written with no immediate sense of an audience” (John Barnard, John Keats [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 98). 7. For an analysis of the density of the phonic constitution of “forlorn” in relation to the whole of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” see especially James O’Rourke, Keats’s Odes and Contemporary Criticism (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1998), 7.

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Chapter 10

“Tu n’d t o Hy m ns of P e r f e c t L ov e”: Th e A ngl ic a n L i t u rg y a s Rom a n t ic Obj ec t i n Joh n K e bl e’s TH E C H R I S T I A N Y E A R Chene Heady

John

Keble’s The Christian Year (1827, 3rd edition, with six additional poems, 1828) was the best-selling book of poetry in nineteenth-century England. Keble’s poetic accompaniment to the Anglican liturgical calendar, with a poem for every Sunday, feast day, and special service, went through ninety-five separate editions during Keble’s lifetime, and had sold “half a million copies [ . . . ] by 1877” (Goodwin 475; Nockles 197). According to Kristie Blair, the most perceptive recent critic of Keble, “Almost every literate Victorian household would have possessed at least one copy” (129). The Christian Year reconfigured Romanticism in terms of orthodox Anglicanism, and in so doing influenced both English poetry and worship for the rest of the century (cf. Tennyson 10–11; Francis 118; Nockles 197; Fraser 5). Keble’s poetry has, however, been largely ignored by literary critics1 and he is remembered more often as an influence on other Anglo-Catholic writers than as a writer in his own regard. I contend that the project of The Christian Year is, as its title would suggest, nothing short of a socialization of time and nature, a reconstruction of Romanticism on a collective, 2 textualist basis. Keble uses The Book of Common Prayer, the public liturgy of the Church of England, as the interpretive key by which he unlocks the

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meaning of an otherwise baffling universe. Like many other Romantics, Keble considers nature to be a divinely inspired text, and attacks scientific empiricism and capitalist industrialism for their misinterpretation and misuse of nature. For Keble, as for Blake in “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” empiricism can “on God’s works no seal of Godhead find” because empiricism is a faulty method of reading the world (“Third Sunday in Advent” 30).3 Employing an image from Jesus’ rhetorical question about John the Baptist—“What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” (Matt. 11: 7)—Keble suggests that the empiricist goes out into the wilderness simply to “count the reeds that tremble in the wind,” and entirely misses the prophetic figure of John the Baptist standing in the middle of the reeds (“Third Sunday in Advent” 27). As Stephen Prickett has observed, the central assumption of Keble’s Romanticism, his belief that the universe is “a living, active, organic whole charged with divine meaning inseparably binding men and Nature,” is particularly influenced by Wordsworth (104). Sounding a Wordsworthian note, in “St. Matthew’s Day” Keble envisions the modern British industrial city as a “Babel,” where the urban poor live in “Mammon’s gloomiest cells” in a “crowded loneliness” (65, 57, 22). Industrial pollution, Keble suggests, is an attempt to sever the City of Man from the Creator; the “mist that man may raise” is an unsuccessful effort to “hide the eye of heaven” (“St. Matthew’s Day” 64, cf. 9–12). Keble’s basic premises about nineteenth-century humanity’s misguided relation to nature are conventionally Romantic; however, since Keble is deeply skeptical of the individual self, he finds the conventional Romantic solutions to these problems untenable. The speaker of “The Fourth Sunday after Advent” gives voice to Keble’s dilemma as an anti-individualistic Romantic. The speaker desires an infinitely meaningful, infinitely beautiful world. Instead, he finds that the world is incomprehensible, as virtually all of “Nature’s beauteous book” is illegible to him, his memory falsifies, leaving only “faint or false” “shadows” of reality, and his “dull and tuneless ear” is deaf to divine music (“Fourth Sunday after Advent” 5–8, 9–12, 13–16). The key Romantic sources of authority—Nature, Memory, and Poetry— are all closed to him. Keble’s speaker has an instinctive sense that the world possesses divine meaning, but for the most part its contents remain tantalizingly indistinct. As he complains: ‘Tis misty all, both sight and sound— I only know ‘tis fair and sweet— ‘Tis wandering on enchanted ground With dizzy brow and tottering feet. (“Fourth Sunday in Advent” 17–20)

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As Rodney Edgecombe notes, in this poem “Creation is too vast a proposition for the creature to absorb; the artist is defeated by his material” (57). Keble was a high Anglican Tory, and as such was deeply skeptical of the individualism valorized by nineteenth-century Evangelicalism,4 Liberalism, and Romanticism. In his sermons, he identifies individualism as an unfortunate result of the Fall of Man, complaining that “[t]here is in all mankind, by corrupt nature, a certain proud love of independence, a desire of standing alone, the ill effects of which are seen and felt in a thousand ways every day” (Sermon XXX 355). Keble holds that modernity has lost the divine meaning of reality, but believes that the individual inspiration of the poetic genius is inherently unable to fix this problem. He asserts that since “original genius” is usually “mixed up with so much of error and paradox,” it generally causes “more harm than good” to its possessor (“Favour Shewn” 4–3). Keble pointedly applies his high Anglican skepticism toward private interpretation of Scripture to Romantic interpretations of nature. He critiques secular nature poets as possessing “no particular certainty, much less any sacredness” in their reading of nature, as they lack evidence that the meaning they find in the natural world was “intended [by God] from the beginning” (166–7, cf. Goodwin 493).5 Since the secular Romantic poets’ interpretation of nature is derived from their own imaginations, it in dubious at best and delusional at worst. Keble finds his solution to his poetic dilemma—his Romantic desire to read the Book of Nature and his high Anglican skepticism of individualism—in the Apostolic fathers’ typological reading of nature. For Keble, the Apostolic Fathers provide a mode of reading both Scripture and nature that avoids the dual errors of Protestant individual interpretation of Scripture and Romantic individualism. Keble holds that the writings of the leaders of the uncorrupt church of the first five Christian centuries provide an accurate, even “practically infallible,” guide to the interpretation of Scripture (cf. “Primitive Tradition” 191; “Postscript” 361). From his earliest writings on, Keble consistently treats “[t]he constant tradition of the early Church” as the reliable measure of the meaning of Scripture (“Jewish Nation” 449; cf. “Primitive Tradition” 202). For Keble, since the Apostles designated their successors, the first bishops of the Christian church, and those bishops in turn designated their own successors, the writings of these early church leaders (such as Clement, Irenaeus. and Cyprian) provide us with an authentic interpretation of the thoughts of the Apostles and, thereby, of Christ (cf. “Primitive Tradition” 195).

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Typology was among the Apostolic Fathers’ favorite interpretive methods. As George Landow notes, typology began in the early Christian church as a means of reading the Old Testament. Events, symbols, and rituals in the Old Testament were taken to foreshadow, symbolize, or suggest “Christ and His dispensation” (Landow 3); the Old Testament “type” was fulfilled and transcended by the New Testament or church “antitype.” Typology provides Keble with the anti-individualistic method of symbolic interpretation he requires. As George Landow has noted, types are by definition “divinely created symbol[s]”: in order for an object to be a type, the type/antitype relation must be thought to have been designed by God himself and to have been indicated or at least implied in the New Testament (Landow 37, 43). The individual imagination of the poet can make an object a symbol in the conventional sense; personal poetic inspiration, however, cannot make an object a type (cf. Bump 38). Keble conceptualized his book-length work on biblical typology, “The Jewish Nation, and God’s Dealings with Them, Paralleled with Individual Christians, and God’s Dealings with Them, while working on The Christian Year and wrote it in the interval between The Christian Year’s first edition (1827) and expanded third edition (1828).6 The thesis of this work is that typology paradoxically brings together the collective and the individual, as “the conduct of the [Jewish] nation [in the Old Testament is] a continual type of man’s conduct towards his God,” “God’s mercies to them [the Jewish people] are typical of His mercies to us [Christians], to us individually, to them in their collective and national capacity” (“Jewish Nation” 437, 475).7 Given Keble’s obsession with typology in 1827 and 1828, it should not be surprising that typology is in many ways central to The Christian Year’s treatment of the Bible, nature, and The Book of Common Prayer. As Keble observes in “Tract 89: On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church,” the Apostolic Fathers extrapolated typological interpretation out onto the natural world, positing that, like the divine revelation in the Jewish covenant, the divine revelation in creation foreshadowed and suggested God’s ultimate relation in Christ (cf. Keble, “Tract 89,” 29, 149). Keble was an authority on the Fathers, and held, quite explicitly, that nature takes on meaning only when we project a patristic, typological reading method from the Bible out onto nature (and not our reading of nature back onto the Bible) (cf “Tract 89” 29, 181).8 As Keble explains, when Jesus in the Gospels ascribes meaning to a natural object—such as “the lilies of the field” in Matthew 6: 28–9—“the CREATOR [is] applying to

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moral or spiritual uses His own outward and visible works; which work He had created, knowing in His Omniscience that He should so apply them, and therefore (among their other final causes) with the very purpose of doing so” (“Tract 89” 123, emphasis Keble’s). The “material world,” Keble insists, is quite literally “constructed” with the “symbolic alphabet of Scripture” in mind, and we can construe its meaning by reference or analogy to Scripture (“Tract 89” 173). Christ taught this lesson to the Apostles, who passed this knowledge on to the Apostolic Fathers via oral tradition (cf. “Tract 89” 99, 181; “Sacred Poetry” 99–100). From the Apostolic Fathers, Keble learned that the “visible world” is “an index or token of the invisible,” that the whole physical world is “typical” of the divine (“Tract 89” 152, 164). The Apostolic Fathers, in Keble’s words, opened “a window [ . . . ] for the lamps lighted within the Church to stream here and there upon the external world” (“Tract 89” 29). In M. H. Abrams’s classic analysis of Romantic literature, The Mirror and the Lamp, the “mirror” represents an eighteenth-century claim that the artist simply represents reality as it is; the “lamp” represents a more truly Romantic claim that the artist depicts the world only as illuminated by the artist’s consciousness. Since Keble holds the Apostolic Fathers of the first centuries of the Christian church to be “practically infallible,” the lamp they hold up to the external world both inscribes meaning on and reveals the meaning of the world. As Keble speculates: [M]ay it not be affirmed that He [Christ] condescends [ . . . ] to have a Poetry of His own, a set of holy and divine associations and meanings, wherewith it is His will to invest all material things? And the authentic records of His will, in this, as in all other truths supernatural, are, of course, Holy Scripture, and the consent of ecclesiastical writers [the Apostolic Fathers]. (“Tract 89” 144, emphasis mine)

For Keble, then, the writings of the Apostolic Fathers function as a guarantee that his own sense that the material world possesses a divine meaning is not merely an individualistic hypothesis or a pleasant delusion: they present a “ ‘fixed and regular set of divine hieroglyphs” that he can use to interpret the world (Goodwin 493). Keble found his Rosetta stone for these “divine hieroglyphs” in The Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer, the public liturgy of the Church of England, is a combination of readings from the Old and New Testament with prayers from patristic and medieval liturgies, as translated, edited, and added to by the Anglican bishops of the

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sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. Keble held that the bishops of the Church of England were, by merit of their apostolic succession, the legitimate heirs of the Apostolic Fathers, and the Church of England an organic continuation of the early church (“Primitive Tradition” 209; Sermon XX 365).9 For Keble, the authority of The Book of Common Prayer comes both from the apostolic succession of the bishops who authorized it and from the patristic origins of its liturgical structure and many of its prayers. Keble asserts that the basic order of Scripture readings contained in the Prayer Book goes back to “the early church” (“Tract 13”), and the elements of the order of the liturgy may even originate with the Apostles themselves (“Postscript” 356).10 In Keble’s thought, the Prayer Book’s synthesis of patristic content and apostolic authority serves to legitimate the divine authority and organic character of the church that produced it. Kettle asserts that “[t]he Prayer-book, taken as it is from the Prayer-books of the first and best times, teaches everywhere [ . . . ] that Christ’s Holy Catholic Church is a real outward visible body, having supernatural grace continually communicated through it by succession from the Apostles, in whose place the bishops are” (“Sermon XXX” 367, emphasis mine). For Keble, then, in The Book of Common Prayer the modern Apostles (the bishops of the Church of England) both interpret the ancient Apostles and, via the sacrament of Holy Orders, transmit their succession; in The Book of Common Prayer, the inspired ancient church speaks with an authoritative, even oracular modern voice. In Kettle’s poem “St. Luke,” for instance, the speaker assumes that apostolic and Anglican worship are fundamentally identical, addressing the saint: Thou hast an ear for angels’ songs, A breath the gospel trump to fill, And taught by thee the Church prolongs Her hymns of high thanksgiving still. (69–72)11

For Keble, in fact, The Book of Common Prayer preserves and presents the prayers and doctrines of the Apostolic Fathers in a divinely guided manner; it is itself in some sense an inspired document. Keble wrote that in compiling its “Canons and formularies” (which is to say, The Book of Common Prayer) the Anglican Church had been “providentially guided” to preserve the doctrines of the Apostolic Fathers (“Letter XXII” 233–34). Charles Wheatly, an eighteenth-century Anglican divine repeatedly cited in Keble’s footnotes to The Christian Year,12 even more pointedly informed his readers that when the original Prayer

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Book was issued, “the king and the three estates in parliament” praised the work as having been produced “by the aid of the holy ghost” (25, emphasis Wheatly’s). In a similar vein, The Christian Year depicts the Anglican Church as an angelic singer chanting “heavenly song” and the Anglican liturgy with its annual “round of holy thought” as an inspired teacher (“Trinity Sunday” 42; “Sunday Next before Advent” 13).13 Significantly, though no critic has previously noted it, for Keble typology is the key to the Prayer Book’s inspired structure. Keble considers the Prayer Book to be a supremely and designedly typological document. By its very nature, the Prayer Book places the Old Testament in typological relation to the New (cf. “Tract 13” 2), the New Testament in relation to the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, and all three in relation to the external world and the secular calendar.14 For many high Anglicans of Keble’s time, the Prayer Book was the “authorized interpreter” of Scripture; for this reason, many high Anglican divines even insisted that the Bible should be available for purchase only when accompanied by the Prayer Book (Nockles 107–8). Keble himself suggests in “Tract 13” that the selection of Scripture readings in The Book of Common Prayer were “providentially” arranged so as to serve as “a clue to many Scripture difficulties” and to “the true use of the Old Testament” (9). Read apart from the Prayer Book, Scripture could only be misinterpreted. Keble’s Christian Year is based on a very original deduction from this common high Anglican premise; for Keble, since the Bible is the interpretive key to the universe, and the Prayer Book the interpretive key to the Bible, the world itself is read correctly only when read in terms of The Book of Common Prayer. The Christian Year is predicated on this logic, in which the Prayer Book models and trains its readers in a patristic method of typological reading whereby, with divine authority, they can reinterpret the world. Keble asserts that if we are “tun’d” to God’s and, by extension, the Prayer Book’s, “hymns of perfect love” (“Fourth Sunday after Epiphany” 56) we will live in a divinely symbolic reality, a divinely ordered world, and nature will become for us a book that “he who runs may read” (“Septuagesima Sunday” 1). As in the patristic idea of the economy, in The Christian Year divine meaning is always approximate, and unfolds gradually, simultaneously constructed and revealed over the course of the liturgical calendar.15 Since an analysis of the entirety of The Christian Year is outside the scope of this study, I exemplify Keble’s method of gradually resacralizing the world through intertextual reference by analyzing four key poems: “Morning” (the first poem in the volume), “Septuagesima Sunday,” “King Charles the Martyr,” and “Ordination” (the last poem in the volume).

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In both “Tract 13” and his work on typology, “The Jewish Nation,” Keble places special emphasis on the role of Psalm 95 in the morning service. He suggests “[t]hat one Psalm may, on reflection, give the key to the arrangement of the [Scripture] lessons” for the whole Anglican liturgical year (“Tract 13” 8). Keble asserts that the Christian typological reading of this Psalm begins with the New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. He argues that when the author of Hebrews “comment[s] on the words of the ninety-fifth Psalm”—“Today if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me [ . . . ] So I swear in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest” (Heb. 3: 7–9, 11 )—his comments imply that “the conduct and fate of the first generation of the Israelites in the wilderness” serve as a type of the temptations and perils individual Christians will face in their attempt to worship God (“Jewish Nation” 489). The Apostolic Fathers then applied this interpretation to the Christians of their own era by making it a rule “from Primitive Times” that Psalm 95 be read as part of the church’s daily worship (“Tract 13” 8–9; “Jewish Nation” 489). Finally, the compilers of The Book of Common Prayer providentially placed this Psalm in the center of the first service in the volume to provide a key that shows that the scriptural readings in the Prayer Book are arranged on a typological basis and must be read in a typological register (“Tract 13” 8–9). As in Keble’s analysis of The Book of Common Prayer, in The Christian Year the opening selection serves as an interpretive key for the volume as a whole. The poem “Morning” states the basic problem of The Christian Year and suggests the solution that will gradually unfold over the course of the volume. Like the Anglican morning service, the poem begins with an act of penitence and a sense of disconnection from God. The speaker asserts that the “hues of the rich unfolding morn,” the “rustling breeze,” and the “fragrant clouds of dewy steam”—by implication, nature as a whole—only “waste” their “treasures of delight / Upon our thankless, joyless sight,” since we are out of step with the divine nature, “awak[ing]” “to sin,” but “seldom” “partaking” of “Heaven” (“Morning” 1, 5, 9, 13–14, 15–16). For Keble, the solution to this problem is, quite explicitly, to reread and rewrite the world so that it reflects the divine. As he writes: If on our daily course our mind Be set to hallow all we find New treasures still, of countless price God will provide for sacrifice [ . . . ]

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Oh, could we learn that sacrifice, What lights would all around us rise! How would our hearts with wisdom talk Along life’s dullest, dreariest walk! (“Morning” 29–32, 45–48)

If we perform this act of reading, Keble suggests, we will find our lives to be “a road / To bring us daily nearer God”; if we resign ourselves to God’s providence, we will find “The secret [ . . . ] of Rest below” and prepare ourselves “for perfect Rest above” (“Morning” 55–6, 60, 62). As Kristie Blair has noted, the apparent simplicity of Keble’s poetry has led to its current critical devaluation. Keble’s “Morning” lyrics may on the surface sound like simplistic inspirational poetry, and indeed are popularly used as a hymn in the Church of England (cf. Tennyson 90). However, when read in intertextual relation to The Book of Common Prayer, “Morning” proves to be a complicatedly allusive typological reflection on both spiritual life and nature. Read in this register, the key words in Keble’s poem are “Sacrifice” and “Rest.” Keble’s assertion that if we read the world with eyes of faith, God will miraculously provide us with “treasures [ . . . ] of countless price,” but we in turn must “sacrifice” these treasures back to God recalls the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God miraculously provided Abraham in his old age with an heir, his son Isaac, but then insisted that Abraham offer Isaac up to him as a sacrifice; when Abraham complied, God then miraculously provided a ram to take the place of Isaac, and Abraham immediately offered it up to God instead. In the Benediction in Luke 1, recited daily in the Anglican Morning Service and referenced in Keble’s footnote to his poem “St. Luke,” Zacharias applies the story of Abraham to his own time, asserting that in the miracles surrounding the birth of Christ, God has “performed the oath which he sware to our forefather Abraham: that [ . . . ] we . . . might serve him without fear, / In holiness and righteousness before him: all the days of our life” (The Book of Common Prayer 10). Keble, then, suggests that our mornings will take on meaning if we read them in light of The Book of Common Prayer’s recitation of the Gospel of Luke’s reference to the Old Testament story of the patriarch Abraham: with this interpretive key, our own lives become allegorical and as in the case of Abraham, what had seemed like a life of lost wandering becomes really a straight “road to [ . . . ] God.” As I have mentioned, Keble considers the Morning Service, and the whole typological framework of The Book of Common Prayer, to revolve around its use of Psalm 95. Psalm 95 ends by pronouncing in the divine first person the doom that befell the rebellious first

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generation of Israelites out of Egypt, “I sware in my wrath: that they should not enter into my rest” (The Book of Common Prayer 5); literally, they will never enter the Promised Land, and will instead die in the wilderness. In Keble’s typological reading, this is also the spiritual doom of the individual Christian who fails to live according to the divine order. But, the poem “Morning” suggests, if we are faithful and read with the eyes of faith, we can live in the divine order, the infinitely meaningful, even allegorical, divine universe, participating in God’s divine, seventh day “Rest” while still here “below” and eventually entering Heaven, God’s “perfect Rest above.” We can read nature as the book of God. In the Canticle of the Three Holy Children, read in the Anglican morning service but never explicitly referenced in Keble’s poem, the “Sun and Moon,” the “Showers and Dew,” and the “Winds of God”—each of the natural objects from which the speaker of Keble’s poem feels disconnected—are all divine signs that “praise [God], and magnify him for ever” (The Book of Common Prayer 8). The final lines of Keble’s poem indicate how the world is to be resacralized, as the speaker asks God to “Help us, this and every day, / To live more nearly as we pray” (“Morning” 63–64). In “Trinity Sunday,” Keble more explicitly asserts that The Book of Common Prayer is the providential means by which the reader is to learn how to live and how to interpret the world. The speaker, echoing the image from “Morning” of life as a “road” to God, reflects that “Along the Church’s central space / The sacred weeks, with unfelt pace, / Hath borne us on from grace to grace” (“Trinity Sunday” 9–12). By seeing life as a reflection of The Book of Common Prayer, by performing daily this act of allegorical, intertextual reading, in Keble’s revisionist Romanticism we create the world anew. In the poem “Septuagesima Sunday,” Keble returns to each of the nature images from which the speaker felt alienated at the beginning of “Morning,” and the speaker, trained by the process of the liturgical year, now confidently reads each of them as Christian types. “Septuagesima Sunday,” the third Sunday before Lent, was a particularly important date in Keble’s analysis of the liturgical year (and of nature in light of the liturgical year), since on that date the cycle of Scripture readings of both the Anglican and early church returns to Genesis 1 and 2 and narrates the creation of the world (“Tract 13” 2). In the Anglican liturgy, the second lessons for matins and evensong on this date are taken from Revelations 21 and 22, and relate God’s recreation of the universe in the new heaven and new earth. Consonant with these themes, Keble devotes “Septuagesima Sunday” to showing more explicitly and in more detail how a

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Christian reading of the natural world imaginatively recreates it and transforms it into allegory. As the opening stanza of the poem asserts, the world is “a book, who runs may read, / Which heavenly truth imparts” to readers who have “Pure eyes and Christian hearts” (“Septuagesima Sunday” 1, 4). The poem largely consists of a series of examples of this premise, showing how the liturgy should train the devout Anglican to see natural object as types of the eternal. To relate only the images that Keble repeats from his “Morning” poem, the “Sun,” which symbolizes Christ, gives its “radiance” to the “Moon,” which symbolizes the Church, glowing with light “borrow[ed]” from the sun (“Septuagesima Sunday” 13–16, Gen. 1: 15–16). “The dew of heaven,” an image echoing both the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2: 6) and the baptismal font, paradise and redemption, is a symbol of God’s “grace,” as “It steals in silence down; / But where it lights, this favoured place / By richest fruits is known” (“Septuagesima Sunday” 29–32). In an image going back to the Gospel of John (3: 8), the “gentl[e] breeze” represents the Holy “Spirit’s viewless way,” the power that both created and now recreates the world, hovering over creation (Gen. 1: 1), blowing where it will and invisible to the eye of the natural man (“Septuagesima Sunday” 39–40). Sticking closely to his anti-individualist interpretive method, Keble unlocks the divine meaning of nature solely by interpreting nature images that have been given symbolic weight in Scripture, then applied to all creation by the Apostolic Fathers,16 and finally highlighted for his attention on Septuagesima Sunday by their presence in the readings for the day in The Book of Common Prayer. The poem’s concluding stanzas both proclaim a mystical meaning for all creation in language strong enough to resemble Blake’s and suggest the intertextual method of interpretation necessary to identify this meaning correctly. The speaker first prophetically declares that: Two worlds are ours: ‘Tis only Sin Forbids us to descry The mystic heaven and earth within, Plain as sea and sky. (“Septuagesima Sunday” 41–44)

and then more humbly begs God to “Give me a heart to find out Thee / And read Thee everywhere” (47–8, emphasis mine). G. B. Tennyson has provocatively suggested that the failure of modern literary criticism to understand nineteenth-century Britain’s fascination with The Christian Year “stems from [the critics’ . . . ] unwillingness or inability” to read the book in its intended intertextual

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context (75, 80). It is a sad irony, then, that Rodney Edgecombe, the only modern critic to offer a sustained analysis of the entirety of The Christian Year, considers “Septuagesima Sunday” to be an ineffective poem because he as a reader “resist[s] Keble’s readiness to offer problematic parallels as though they were transparent” (82).17 For the patristically grounded student of The Book of Common Prayer that Keble assumes as a reader, Keble’s parallels are transparent; Edgecombe may be unwilling or unable to participate in Keble’s economy, but this has no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself. Keble’s Romantic treatment of The Book of Common Prayer as an inspired communal text that reshapes both its readers and the world is heightened, and reaches its logical conclusion in the six poems he added to The Christian Year for its 1828 third edition. His theology of the Prayer Book is perhaps most clearly expressed in his controversial poem “King Charles the Martyr.” In “King Charles the Martyr,” the Anglican liturgy possesses supernatural power, especially, the power to inscribe meaning on time. In this poem, King Charles literally gives his life for the Prayer Book, and God responds by imposing the Prayer Book’s meaning on time. As I have noted, Keble saw The Book of Common Prayer as a divinely inspired guide to typological interpretation of Scripture and the world. The basic function of a liturgical calendar is to order time and as George Landow has noted, typology also gives “an order and significance to human time” in the form of type and antitype, before and after (5). For Keble, the liturgical year is a finite reflection of divine time; the liturgical calendar redeems human time by centering it on Christ, thereby foreshadowing the future eternal day of rest in the new heaven and earth. As Keble writes in the poem “Easter”: Enthroned in thy sovereign sphere, Thou [Christ] shedd’st thy light on all the year; Sundays by thee more glorious break, An Easter Day in every week: And week days, following in their train, The fullness of thy blessing gain Till all, both resting and employ, Be one Lord’s day of holy joy. (5–12)18

In “King Charles the Martyr” the theory that Keble asserts in “Easter” is performed. In “King Charles the Martyr,” the Anglican liturgical calendar is literally supernatural in its functions, ordering and shaping time with prophetic authority.

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For Keble, in the feast of “King Charles the Martyr” the Anglican Church authoritatively condemned the dissenting Protestants who objected to both his version of typological reading and his vision of the liturgical calendar, who, in short, desired to deprive time of divine meaning. Until 1859, the Anglican Church annually observed the death of King Charles I on January 30 as the feast of a saint and martyr. Since Charles was put to death by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell, the Anglican Church, in commemorating his death, offered an annual condemnation of dissenting Protestantism to match its annual condemnation of Roman Catholicism on the 5th of November. Like many high Anglicans, Keble had “a romantic, almost mystical” devotion to King Charles I and a pronounced dislike of Protestant dissent (Nockles 72; Keble, “Danger” 119). Keble wrote his poem “King Charles the Martyr” in 1828, the year the Corporation Act was repealed and dissenters were first allowed to serve as members of Parliament. Keble considered this development to be tantamount to the unchurching of the English nation, as a nonAnglican Parliament would now guide and direct the affairs of the Anglican Church (Skinner 33–34). In his famous “National Apostasy” sermon that began the Oxford Movement (1833), Keble attributes the evils of the dissenters especially to their failure to read the Old Testament typologically—that is, according to Keble’s personal typological theory, “God dealt formerly with the Jewish people in a manner analogous to that in which he deals now [ . . . ] with the souls of individual Christians” (543–44). Literal interpretation of Scripture, Keble suggests, leads either to fanaticism and regicide or to unbelief (“Sermon on National Apostasy” 543–4; cf. “Jewish Nation” 438).19 Keble’s “Tract 13,” which shows that The Book of Common Prayer would have taught a typological reading method to the dissenters, had they listened, followed less than a year later. The dissenters also as a mass objected to the idea of a prescribed, common form of prayer and, often, the very idea of a liturgical year. Charles Wheatly’s work on The Book of Common Prayer, which Keble repeatedly cites in both The Christian Year and “Tract 13,” was explicitly written to justify the idea of a “precomposed” national liturgy and liturgical calendar against “the objections urged by the Dissenters” (1). The dissenters, then, represent for Keble a world devoid of typological meaning, a world where time is a meaningless succession of secular days. For Keble, dissent, like Byronic Romanticism and like the modern age itself, is fundamentally individualistic, and is therefore demystifying and nihilistic in its effects, if not in its intentions.

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Keble’s poem “King Charles the Martyr,” like many of his poems, begins by stating the problem it will attempt to solve: the present age—“our fallen days” (6)—seems to be devoid of divine meaning. Keble enumerates two basic reasons for this problem. Nature no longer openly speaks to us (as it did to Jesus and the Apostles) of its meaning, and the modern age, unlike the Apostolic age, is devoid of supernatural miracles that serve as transparent, self-interpreting signs of the deity. “The thunders of the deep prophetic sky” are “silent now” and “in our sight no powers of darkness bow / Before th’ Apostles’ glorious company” (“King Charles the Martyr” 2–4). In the face of such divine silence, Keble finds meaning through the Christian logic of redemptive suffering; if Anglicans cannot produce miracles by the power of Christ, they can still die for him. Even “Far in the North” in “our fallen days,” he writes, we have seen that “The Martyrs’ noble army is still ours,” for King Charles has died for the faith of his people (“King Charles the Martyr” 6, 5). The Feast of King Charles the Martyr serves as a divine sign that the Anglican faith is legitimate, and has been accepted by God. For Keble, King Charles is the symbolic representative of all Anglicans, the “True son of our dear Mother,” the king who individually represents his collective people (“King Charles the Martyr” 21). As a synecdoche for all Anglicans, King Charles is both the product of and now a part of the Prayer Book. King Charles, Keble writes, was “early taught” to “worship” by the Prayer Book and “love[d] to trace her daily lore” (“King Charles the Martyr” 21, 22, 25). Like the ideal reader of The Christian Year, his “heart” was one with the sentiments of the Prayer Book, an idea Keble makes explicit by stressing that “where we look for comfort or for calm,” Charles “didst love” “Over the self-same lines to bend” (“King Charles the Martyr” 26–28). The Prayer Book, in fact, gives Charles the spirit to die an Anglican martyr. Keble writes that “When all forsook” Charles, as all forsook Christ, the church “repay[ed] his loyal love” by using the Prayer Book to “tur[n his] dying eye” “straight to the Cross” (“King Charles the Martyr” 29, 30, 32). Seeing meaning in his predicament because of the Prayer Book, seeing himself even as an antitype of Christ (cf. Landow 145) Charles can have the courage to die a martyr in these empty, demythologized “fallen days” marked by a general lack of faith. And as a martyr, Charles can now become part of the Anglican liturgical calendar, the only saint added to that calendar after the Reformation. As Keble writes, “Yearly now . . . she [the Anglican Church] offers her maternal tears” for King Charles, calling on all Anglicans to imitate his example (“King Charles the Martyr” 33–35). The feast of King Charles the

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Martyr is the epitome of The Christian Year, as the Anglican shaped by the Prayer Book dies for the Prayer Book and, subsumed into the Prayer Book, becomes part of the divine order. In a certain sense, the Prayer Book itself—which Cromwell banned—dies with Charles and is resurrected in the institution of his feast. The Prayer Book’s supernatural power both to inscribe meaning on and reveal the meaning of time is most clearly indicated in Keble’s footnote to “King Charles the Martyr.” In his footnote, Keble relates a story about King Charles also narrated in Charles Wheatly’s work on The Book of Common Prayer (cf. Wheatly 512–13). On January 30, the day of his execution, King Charles heard Bishop Juxon read the Anglican service for the day. The service included a reading of Matthew 27, in which Jesus is brought before Pilate, and then crucified. The king assumed that the bishop must have personally chosen the text in question as a consolation to him upon his own imminent martyrdom. The bishop assured him that, to the contrary, it was simply the prescribed reading for January 30 in the Anglican liturgical calendar. King Charles was both moved and strengthened by this coincidence, and went forward to his martyrdom (“King Charles the Martyr” footnote 1). January 30, of course, later becomes the feast of King Charles the Martyr, assuring that the Scripture readings for that day will always include Matthew 27. For Keble, the Table of Lessons in The Book of Common Prayer thus both prophesies many years in advance the date of King Charles’s martyrdom (predicting the day’s inherent meaning) and proclaims that this day is ever to be remembered as the day of his martyrdom (inscribing meaning on the day). “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea,” another of Keble’s 1828 additions to The Christian Year, applies the same paradox to nature, as “the lonely Ocean learns” the “orisons” of the Anglican Church; quite literally, The Book of Common Prayer, like Christ, speaks divine words that control and reorder the waves (10, emphasis mine). The Christian Year closes with Keble’s poem ‘‘Ordination,” which was also the final poem he wrote for the volume. “Ordination” completes the logic of “King Charles the Martyr” as it directly asserts that The Book of Common Prayer has the power to call down the deity and order creation. In this poem, Keble meditates on the ordination service itself, the means by which Apostolic succession is conveyed in the Anglican Church. He takes his epigraph from the Prayer Book’s order of service and, following the Prayer Book, he invokes the Holy Spirit in a paraphrase of the eighth-century hymn “Veni, Creator Spiritus” (“Come, Creator Spirit”) as he prays that the apostolic gift will continue in the Anglican Church (“Ordination” 23–24).

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Thus, in Keble’s Romantic Anglicanism, the Prayer Book bestows identity with the Apostolic Fathers on its priests by quoting the words of the Apostolic Fathers over them; taken into the divine sacramental order, these priests in turn bestow typological order and meaning on creation. In “Ordination,” the moment of silence prior to the singing of “Veni, Creator Spiritus” in the Anglican ordination service serves as both the antitype of the “Israel’s prayer” in the “temple” and the type of the silence in heaven as God judges the world in the book of Revelation (“Ordination” 4, 2, 5–8). Keble writes that the patristic hymn that breaks this silence “seems not to th’ entrancéd ear / Less than Thine [Christ’s] own heart-cheering call” (“Ordination” 27–28); the language of the Fathers is the language of Christ, is the divine order, and ushers the Anglican Church into this divine order. The “Veni, Creator Spiritus” serves as Christ’s “earnest given / That these our prayers are heard, and they [the ordinands], / Who grasp, this hour the sword of Heaven, / Shall feel Thee on their weary way” (“Ordination” 29–32); the words of the Fathers are the pledge that the gift of the Holy Spirit has been given, and the ordinands now live in a divine, ordered world. After proclaiming the efficacy of the ordination service, Keble immediately brings the volume back to its beginning; he echoes the titles of The Christian Year’s first two poems, depicting the new priest’s sacramental labors as taking place at “morn or soothing eve” (“Ordination” 32). In this sacramental context, Keble revisits for the last time in the volume the basic nature images from which the speaker felt alienated in the poem “Morning.” Now, Keble no longer writes of the light of the morning that typifies God; he writes directly of the “Spirit of Light” (“Ordination” 37). Now, Keble no longer writes of the natural wind that typifies the Holy Spirit; he begs the “Spirit of Christ” to blow, as in Pentecost, directly into the new ordinands, to “fan them with Thine airs serene” (“Ordination” 36). He no longer writes of the dew that typifies the waters of baptism; he writes of “the Holy Fount” over which the priests “lean[s]” as he ushers a child into the sacramental economy through baptism (“Ordination” 32–36). The sacramental vision that, in Keble’s critique of conventional Romanticism, poetry has taken from the divine mysteries has been reconnected to the sanctuary (cf. Keble’s Lectures on Poetry 270). The patristic logic of apostolic succession that has informed The Christian Year ends in ordination; the sacramental picture of reality that has infused the work is consummated by a depiction of this sacrament that confers the power to bestow sacraments; Keble’s book-length mystical meditation on The Book of Common Prayer concludes with the words of the Prayer Book becoming Christ’s own.

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While excellent articles on Keble’s view of nature and theory of poetry have been published relatively recently, 20 no critic has systematically analyzed how Keble’s liturgical theories impact his poetic practice (which is odd, since The Christian Year derives its entire poetic structure from the liturgy). When read in light of his liturgical theories, Keble’s Romanticism seems both much more original and much more mystical than it is often given credit for. The Christian Year should be seen as a very ambitious Romantic epic poem—G. B. Tennyson has noted that it can be read as a single poem, a protracted meditation on the Book of Common Prayer (79–80)—that attempts nothing short of the reconstruction of the universe as Christ’s poem, the reordering of chronos, the meaningless succession of days, as kairos, divinely ordered time. In Keble’s epic, this divine meaning is emphatically intertextual and collective, the possession of all who ruminate on the national liturgy. Keble’s belief in the Church as a divinely organic institution has permitted him to resolve in a very original manner a central tension that Stephen Prickett and others have noted in Wordsworthian Romanticism: Wordsworth’s seemingly contradictory assertions that the meaning he finds in nature is created by his poetic imagination, and that his poetic imagination is itself the product of his communion with nature (Prickett 76). Wordsworth, in short, cannot decide whether the meaning he finds in nature is inherent or ascribed. For Keble, paradoxically, nature’s meaning is inherent because it is ascribed. God, with divine foreknowledge, creates the natural object at the beginning of time because it will later be invested with typological meaning by Christ and the Apostolic Fathers, and because still later this typological meaning, enshrined in The Book of Common Prayer, will be read back onto creation by the Anglican faithful. In Keble’s revisionist Romanticism, the liturgical precedes the material; the collective text creates our shared world.

Notes 1. On the neglect of Keble in literary criticism, see Kristie Blair, “John Keble and the Rhythm of Faith,” Essays in Criticism 53 (2003): 130. 2. Blair has analyzed Keble’s use of poetic meter and The Book of Common Prayer as means of regulating individual emotion, and my suggestion that Keble posts a collective Romanticism is indebted to her work. 3. Keble consistently considers empiricism a theological heresy. Historically, he criticizes Gnosticism as a “low-minded empirical system”; philosophically, he condemns John Locke as “an Arian” (“Primitive Tradition Recognised in Holy Scripture,” 1836, Sermons,

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4. 5.

6.

7.

Chene He a dy Academical and Occasional, 2nd ed. [Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1848], 215; “Postscript to the Sermon on Tradition,” Sermons, Academical and Occasional, 2nd ed., 380). Since the sermon “Primitive Tradition” postdates The Christian Year, I should note that in this essay I follow the practice of Keble critics in general, and occasionally use texts Keble published after The Christian Year to elucidate the work. Keble critics are driven into this method by the paucity of material Keble published prior to The Christian Year, and justify the practice by referencing Keble’s legendary intellectual consistency and conservatism. For all major interpretive points, however, I reference Keble’s earliest (pre-1828) works unless, as is the case with Keble’s treatment of nature as typology, The Christian Year itself is so explicit on the point as to require no clarification. Stephen Prickett observes that Keble shunned with horror “[ . . . ] the fervour and aggressive individualism of the Evangelicals” (93). By contrast, Keble writes in “Fifteen Sunday after Trinity,” that, while we are unable to interpret the many natural objects whose divine meaning has not been revealed to us, we can truly know the symbolic meaning of the lily, since Christ has revealed in Matthew 6. The speaker addresses the lily, observing, “ye could draw th’ admiring gaze / Of Him [Christ] who worlds and hearts surveys: / Your order wild, your fragrant maze, / He taught us how to prize” (“Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity” 36–40). The earliest preserved textual account of Keble’s typological theories is found in a letter he wrote to J. T. Coleridge on June 22, 1827. In this letter, Keble both expounds his typological theory at some length and announces the publication of the first edition of The Christian Year (Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M.A., Late Vicar of Hursley, 3rd ed. [Oxford: James Parker and Co., 1870], 151). Keble’s book-length work on typology, “The Jewish Nation,” was not published until after his death, but can be precisely dated by its location in his commonplace book. The work is placed exactly between the final poems written for the first edition of The Christian Year and five of the six poems added to the work’s 1828 third edition (Preface to Occasional Papers and Reviews by John Keble, ed. E. B. Pusey [Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1877], ix–x). Keble’s work on typology can, then, be slated between mid-1827 and early 1828; it is both informed by his composition of The Christian Year and informs the new poems in the 1828 third edition. As I discuss, the 1828 poems—especially “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea,” “King Charles the Martyr,” and “Ordination”—exemplify Keble’s typological theory in a particularly explicit manner. Keble’s ideas about typology here seem analogous to Coleridge’s ideas about poetry; for Coleridge, as M. H. Abrams notes, in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), poetry is a means of “reconciling the opposites” of the universal and the individual (56).

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8. Keble, along with other Anglo-Catholic poets, revived and popularized the patristic typological reading of nature. In “Tract 89: On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church,” Keble forcibly argues against evangelical Protestants (who would restrict typological references to Christ or the Church) that the idea of a “type” can be legitimately “transfer[red]” from Scripture out onto “the works of nature” (Keble, “Tract 89”; cf. George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Religion [Boston, MA: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1980], 46; Jerome Bump, “The Victorian Radicals: Time, Typology, and Ontology in Hopkins, Pusey, and Müller,” Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism, ed. Jude Nixon [New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004], 33). 9. Keble held to a branch theory of ecclesiology, in which the Anglican Church, Roman Catholic Church, and Eastern Orthodox Church each embody the ancient Catholic Church for the area under its geographical jurisdiction. He asserted that “our visible communion with the Church of England” is “our earnest” of “virtual communion with the One Catholic Church, East and West, as before its separation” (“Endurance of Church Imperfections,” Sermons, Academical and Occasional. 2nd ed. [Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1848], 320). 10. Charles Wheatly, an eighteenth-century Anglican divine whose ideas influenced The Christian Year, argues at scholarly length that the liturgies on which The Book of Common Prayer is based may be apostolic in origin, preserved by and developed further by the apostles’ successors, the Apostolic Fathers (A Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: Being the Substance of Every Thing Liturgical in Bishop Sparrow, Mr. L’Estrange, Dr. Comber, Dr. Nichols, and All Former Ritualists, Commentators, and Others, Upon the Same Subject; 1710 [London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849], 13, 125). 11. One of Keble’s footnotes for the poem lists the hymns used in the liturgy that are first found in the Gospel of Luke: “the Magnficat, Benedictus, and Nunc Dimittis.” 12. See Keble’s footnotes for “St. Stephen’s Day” and “The Churching of Women.” 13. For evidence that Keble’s poetic images about the divine nature of the Anglican service are also meant quite literally, see his sermon “Eucharistical Offices,” in which he rhetorically asks, “What is there wanting in our Altars, to make the comers thereunto perfect? Have we not an Apostolical Creed, an Apostolical Ministry, Apostolical yearnings after unity? Have we not the presence of Angels in our hymns, of Saints departed in our holy commemorations?” (271). 14. In “Tract 13: Sunday Lessons. The Principle of Selection,” Keble argues, in language that directly echoes the overriding thesis of his earlier work on typology, that “the arrangers [of The Book of Common Prayer]” chose their “selection of scriptural readings in order “to exhibit God’s former dealings with His chosen people

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15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

Chene He a dy collectively [ . . . ] in such manner as best illustrates His dealing with each individual chosen now to be in His Church” (2, emphasis Keble’s). In his biography of Keble, J. T. Coleridge notes that “Tract 13” is essentially “an application” of Keble’s typological theory (225). No critic has noted the typological content of “Tract 13,” perhaps because it can be recognized as typological only according to Keble’s own definitions of “Type and Antitype,” which, as Edgecombe notes, “tak[e] considerable license” with traditional conceptions of typology; Keble himself grants that he uses the terms “in a wider sense” than most other authorities on the subject (Rodney Edgecombe, Two Poets of the Oxford Movement: John Keble and John Henry Newman [Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996], 117; John Keble, “The Jewish Nation and God’s Dealings with Them, Paralleled with Individual Christians, and God’s Dealings with Them,” Occasional Papers and Reviews by John Keble, ed. E. B. Pusey [Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1877], 475). Keble endorses the principle of the economy in both The Christian Year and his sermons. In the poem “Catechism,” Keble uses the religious instruction of children as an analogy to show that our language regarding the divine is always “but cries of babes” compared to the divine reality; Christ graciously accepts and gradually corrects our inadequate language and understanding (35). Keble holds that God “condescend[s] to teach us,” “by imitating” our “imperfect utterance”; the Bible gradually “lead[s] those who approach it in the right disposition, from one degree of spiritual strength to another”(“Favour Shewn” 20, 12). On the Apostolic Fathers’ treatment of the sun and moon as symbols, see “Tract 89” 155–56. On their treatment of dew as a symbol, see “Tract 89” 179–81. On their treatment of wind as a symbol, see “Tract 89” 179. Edgecombe has offered a detailed and useful analysis of The Christian Year, poem by poem. His broader critique of Keble is riddled with logical inconsistencies, however. In his introductory chapter, he insists that the work should not be interpreted in terms either of Romanticism or of the Oxford Movement (see, e.g., page 42). In the body of the work, he proceeds to discuss Keble’s many affinities with Keats (81) and to analyze Keble’s poetry in terms of patristic allegory and Tractarian reserve (89, 117). On the eschatological import of the liturgical calendar, see also “First Sunday after Christmas” 43–48. Nockles relates that Keble’s political use of K ing Charles I’s death was not uncommon in High Church circles at the time. “Even as late as the 1820s, High Churchmen could invoke the cult of the Royal Martyr as a political weapon in defense of Orthodoxy and to discredit Protestant Dissenters who were branded as heirs of

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the regicides” (Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 52). 20. I refer particularly to Gregory Goodwin’s and Kristie Blair’s valuable work.

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Chapter 11

Jou r n e y s t o t h e E a s t : Sh e l l e y a n d Nova l is William S. Davis

The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place for romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. —Edward Said

A mong the cast of characters in the fifth of Novalis’s (Friedrich von

Hardenberg’s) Hymns to the Night (1800) is a mysterious “Singer” who travels Eastward from Greece, first to Palestine where he sings to the baby Jesus, then on to “Indostan” where, “drunk with love,” he spreads the glad tidings through words that transcend mortal speech. Around a decade and a half later, the hero of Percy Shelley’s Alastor (1816), similarly a nameless “Poet,” travels from Europe ever eastward through “the wild Carmanian waste, / And o’er the aerial mountains” to the “Vale of Kashmir” in northern India where he dreams of a “veiléd maid” who communes with him in a melding embrace that likewise exceeds articulation. Along with their participation in the general discourse of Romantic Orientalism, both texts share the fantasy of a pilgrimage to a Romanticized East that functions as the site for the fulfillment of a very Western dream of overcoming distance, alienation, misunderstanding, and loss through a form of communion that exceeds the limitations of linguistic signs— paradoxically employing Otherness as a vehicle for sameness.

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The “Orient,” according to Edward Said, comes to function prominently in literary texts as a site of pilgrimage sometime around 1800. The journey eastward had grown in both the popular and scientific imaginations for some time, with new forms of Orientalism emerging in cultural representations of all sorts—from scientific endeavors such as Sir William Jones’s “discovery” of Sanskrit (brought to Germany by Herder and Friedrich Schlegel), to popular amusements such as William Bullock’s faux-Egyptian “Belzoni’s Tomb” exhibit in London.1 Poets made their own uses of this material opened to them by historians and explorers. Said makes special mention of Byron’s The Giaour (1812), Goethe’s West-Östlicher Diwan (1819), and Hugo’s Orientales (1829), as literary encounters with a Romanticized East that became particularly intense in the wake of Napoleon’s Eastern campaign and the British imperialist impulse it attempted to counter (Said 166–68). Probing the discourse from which the literary aspect of this Romantic Orientalism arises, Said wonders what exactly the imaginary encounter with the East is looking for there: “What is it in the Orient for? . . . Why does it set itself there,” rather than in some other imaginatively reconfigured point of the globe? (157). These literary encounters with the East, as opposed to travel narratives (however fanciful) or investigations with scientific import, do not require a physical journey, after all, but travel “to the Orient for a very concrete sort of experience without actually leaving Europe” (157). One answer he proposes is that, because of the Western “re-vision” of the East since the eighteenth century, the Romanticized Orient is able to function as the fulfillment of the Western fantasy of a place in which the normal boundaries of space and time no longer apply, as a place that “wore away the European discreteness and rationality of time, space, and personal identity. In the Orient one suddenly confronted unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance” (167). The boundless, the timeless, the impossibly archaic and inchoate are all qualities that arise in Novalis’s “Indostan” and Shelley’s “Kashmir,” allowing these fictionalized sites to function as geographic signifiers of a space beyond, as sites of a poetic pilgrimage to the far side of language and consciousness. The Romantic writer, according to Said, is able to employ Orientalism in the service of a higher end: “the writer for whom a real or metaphorical trip to the Orient is the fulfillment of some deeply felt and urgent project. His text therefore is built on a personal aesthetic, fed and informed by the project” (158). On this reading, Romantic Orientalism is the answer to a very Western form of

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desire that finds literary expression in a variety of texts in the decades around 1800. The examples of Novalis and Shelley help to illuminate at least one aspect of this “urgent project” that sends Romantic poets to the East, hoping there to discover something that exceeds the parameters of what they could find in their own backyards. The philosophy and theory that arise in the wake of Kant, and which was of “urgent” concern to both poets, help to articulate the nature of the mysterious otherness they sought to give lyric expression through metaphors that reach beyond the borders of “time, space, and personal identity.” Here Orientalism and philosophy come together in the poetic vision of a journey to the East as a metaphor for a journey into the inner reaches of the soul. Romantic Orientalism, in the strand we encounter in poet/philosophers such as Novalis and Shelley, appropriates an imaginary Orient as a geographic signifier that allows for the embodiment of otherwise abstract post-Kantian concepts. The “East,” seen through this Romantic lens, is the place where the tortured dream of melding the long-separated Subject and Object back into a meaningful whole finds tangible expression, the “concrete sort of experience” Said claims Romantic poets so urgently seek in the Orient.

Intellectual Intuitions Novalis and Shelley are able to use the East as a surrogate for an interior psychic space in part because common tropes support an alignment of the mystical and counter-rational Orient with philosophical ideas of an interiority beyond temporal and spatial divisions that arises in this discourse around 1800. Of particular relevance is the contested concept of intellectual intuition (intellektuale Anschauung), especially as Schelling worked it out in the late 1790s. “Intellectual” intuition, whose very possibility Kant denies, stands in contrast to “sensory” intuition—the necessary characteristic of the human subject that allows us to represent material objects in meaningful ways, to make sense of the raw data of experience that endlessly confront us. But Subject and Object would remain forever split, Schelling argues, if not for our innate ability to step beyond the constraints of space and time: We all have a secret and remarkable capacity to remove ourselves from the flux of time and to withdraw into our own interior self, now stripped of all that is extraneous to it, and there—under the form of immutability—to observe eternity within ourselves. . . . In this moment

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of intuition time and constancy disappear for us: we are not in time, but time—or rather pure and absolute eternity—is in us.2

Although the capacity is universal in theory, it is also “secret” (geheim) and hence retains a quality of the esoteric—only those in the know have access to it, and fewer still understand its philosophical importance. It gains added mystery by comprising two distinct paradoxes that appear within this Romantic brand of Orientalism as well: a place that is nowhere, and a moment that is eternal. This intellectual intuition comes into play when we cease to be an object for ourselves, when, withdrawn into itself, the seeing self becomes one with the seen self. In this moment of intuition, time and eternity disappear: we are not in time, but time—or rather pure and absolute eternity—is in us. We are not a part of the intuition of the objective world, but rather the world is lost in our intuition. (my translation)3

Intuiting intellectually solves the problem of bodies in space and time. It is not that time simply stops but that all time is contained in one moment. It is not that space has ceased to be but that physical boundaries no longer have dominion over the self, since concepts such as “subject” and “object” are no longer relevant. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, in a Series of Letters (1795), Schiller likewise proposes a mental space beyond time and material boundaries. He describes the human condition in terms of a tension between an eternal and unchanging form, which he calls Person, and the material conditions that allow this form to exist in the real world—Zustand. The Person comprises the essential qualities that allow us to recognize both ourselves and others as consistent and integral individuals, despite our physical changes over time—the “us” that will always exist. In Schiller’s analogy, “if we say the flower blooms and fades, we posit the flower itself as immutable within this transformation and simultaneously grant it an identity [Person] through which both of these conditions are revealed” (my translation).4 In any formulation of the sort—X changes over time— there remains an essential and identifiable X that remains despite all transformation. Without the limitations of a material condition, or Zustand, however, this self could never assume actuality in the material world. In the twelfth letter he heightens the sense of struggle between these opposing aspects of being by associating them with competing drives—the “sensory drive” and the “drive for form” (sinnlicher Trieb and Form Trieb). The sensory drive strives to limit

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and contain the expansive and transcendent urges of the formal drive: “With unbreakable bonds the sensory drive chains the higher striving spirit to the world of the senses, calling abstraction back to the borders of the present from its freest wandering in that which has no bounds” (my translation).5 Near the end of the twelfth letter, however, we find a fantasy of the drive for form set free from all sensory experience and longing, a vision of the transcendence of the limitations of space, time, and materiality: Thus whenever the drive for form maintains an upper hand and the pure object works within us we find the highest expansion of being. In this state all borders disappear, and we are elevated to a unity of ideas that subordinates the entire world of appearances. During this experience we are no longer in time, but time exists in us as a whole and never-ending stream. We are no longer individuals, but universal. The judgment of all minds is spoken through ours; the desire of all hearts is represented through our deed. (my translation)6

In Schiller’s vision of this paradoxical brief moment of eternity, the Subject escapes its limited relation to countless objects in a material and temporal universe—the world of appearances—and suddenly experiences the myriad forms of being as one. In this state there is no longer a subject surrounded by objects, but one unity outside of time and differentiation. Objectivity is “pure” in a Kantian sense (“das reine Objekt”), free of the limitations of time and space. The spatial metaphors that appear alongside the temporal metaphors in Schiller’s account are striking. The escape from time is a border crossing, a transgression of “the borders of the present” [die Grenzen der Gegenwart] into a realm of “freest wandering” [freieste Wanderung]. This fantasy of an escape from the limits of a fallen and divided material world to a realm of “purity” and unity is a key trope in the Romantic discourse. For example, Faust in his study, as he longs to escape the constraints of the material world in which he feels himself to be no better than a “worm,” entertains his own fantasies of an expansion of being that would propel him into a realm of “pure activity,” a form of being beyond a world corrupted by time and “matter” (Stoff). As he plots his escape, Faust relies on metaphors that resonate directly with Schiller’s Form and Zustand. Den Göttern gleich ich nicht! Zu tie fist es gefühlt; Dem Wurme Gleich’ ich, der den Staub durchwühlt; Den, wie er sic him Staube Nährend lebt, Des Wandrers Tritt vernichtet und begräbt. (ll. 652–55; WA I.14: 38)

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[I am not like the gods! That was a painful thrust; I’m like the worm that burrows in the dust, Who, as he makes of dust his meager meal Is crushed and buried by a wanderer’s heel.] (Kaufmann 113)

As in Schiller’s account of competing drives in which the sensual forever attempts to limit and contain the “higher striving mind” (der höher strebende Geist), Faust is disgusted by the way in which matter (Stoff) clings to everything that otherwise seeks expansion and elevation: Dem Herrlichsten, was auch der Geist empfangen, Drängt immer fremd und fremder Stoff sich an; Wenn wir zum Guten dieser Welt gelangen, Dan heiβt das Bess’re Trug und Wahn. Die uns das Leben gaben, herrliche Gefühle Estarren in dem irdischen Gewühle. (634–39) [Whatever noblest things the mind received, More and more foreign matter spoils that theme; And when the good of this world is achieved, What’s better seems an idle dream. That gave us our life, the noblest urges Are petrified in the earth’s vulgar surges.] (Kaufmann 113)

Faust plots an escape, which ultimately can take only the form of suicide: “Ich fühle mich bereit, / Auf neuer Bahn den Äther zu durchdringen, / Zu neuen Spahären reiner Tätigkeit [I feel prepared to take a new path, to pass through the ether to new spheres of pure activity]” (703–5). Like Schiller’s “expansion of being,” Faust’s “pure activity” depends on metaphors of a spatial journey, of a voyage beyond—as if the language of mental expansion or intellectual discovery requires a bolder formulation to take on life as poetry. In Goethe’s poetic drama, as well as in Schiller’s theoretical musings, to escape the body is not merely a mental exercise, but a journey to another realm. Unlike Faust’s suicide fantasy, Schelling’s description of intellectual intuition relies on the metaphor of a journey into the self, rather than on a journey to a space beyond. Yet, if the vehicles differ, the tenors of these metaphors are finally quite close. As Hardenberg’s Ofterdingen puts it, “Wo gehen wir den hin? Immer nach Hause [And where are we going? Always home].” Goethe’s Faust, along with the philosophical investigations of Schiller and Schelling, articulates the object of the quest—the realm of “pure activity,” beyond the limits of time and space, that finds convenient localization in the Orient as a land beyond.

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Novalis’s “Fiery Song” Hardenberg’s journey to the East appears in what is by far the longest of the six Hymns to the Night. Hymn number five is a mytho-poetical history of the human race in relation to the divine, influenced by Herder’s Paramythien and in part a response to Schiller’s poem of human alienation from the divine, “Die Götter Griechenlands.”7 Hardenberg’s version begins just as the new gods and their human offspring have supplanted the Titans. A harmonious golden age ensues, and humans live for centuries at one with nature and the divine until death appears as “one atrocious dream image” [ein entsetzliches Traumbild] to destroy the “revelry” [Lustgelag] of humanity’s youth (Hardenberg 143–45; translation Higgins 25). Even the gods are helpless in the face of the new tyrant Death and withdraw into the heavens behind the veil of night, leaving humans alone and alienated from the divine, from nature, and from each other. Unable to appease or conquer death, they aestheticize their horror through the image of a beautiful youth extinguishing the torch of life. At the very center of the poem, however, Jesus appears to return life to the world. Along with the traditional Magi from the East, we read of a mysterious “Singer” (Sänger) who comes from Greece to Palestine where he sings a song for Jesus before passing on to “Indostan” to spread the “glad tidings” (fröhlich Botschaft): “Von ferner Küste, unter Hellas heiterm Himmel geboren, kam ein Sänger nach Palästina und ergab sein ganzes Herz dem Wunderkinde (1:147) [From far shores, born under Greece’s happy skies, a singer came to Palestine and poured out his heart to the wonder-child]” (Higgins 29). This Singer is the only figure in Novalis’s mythological hymn who is a free invention, having no referent in other mythologies, legends, or scriptures. As well as a counterpart to the Magi traveling from East to West to visit Jesus—“Zu des Königs demütiger Wiege wies ihr ein Stern den Weg (1: 145) [a star showed the way to the King’s humble cradle]” (Higgins 29)—the Singer functions in the spirit of Friedrich Schlegel’s notion that the “poeticizing philosopher, as well as the philosophizing poet, is a prophet” (Athenäum Fragment #249, 2: 207).8 The first task of the anonymous Singer is to address prophetic lines of verse to the child Jesus himself: Der Jüngling bist du, der seit langer Zeit Auf unsern Gräbern steht in tiefem Sinnen; Ein tröstlich Zeichen in der Dunkelheit— Der Höhern Menschheit freudiges Beginnen,

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The Singer has no name that could individualize or limit him, allowing him to function more as a type of Schlegel’s “universal and progressive” poetry itself (Athenäum Fragment 116, 2: 182), than as an individual voice. He possesses both poetical and prophetic insight, which allows him to recognize the true nature of Jesus (and to sing a song about it). But his key function within the myth is to reunite in the human span what has been torn apart, which he does by instructing not only us, but Jesus himself, on the proper reading of signs: “You are the youth who since ancient days / Has stood in contemplation on our graves.” Does the “Wunderkind” Jesus really need a Poet to tell him who he is? Perhaps not. But the significance of this second-person singular for Novalis’s mythology lies in its ability to unite the classical and the modern under a single signifier. As he does so, Novalis displaces the theological significance of Jesus as atoner, redeemer, or savior from sin and makes him instead into a figure of what we might call semiotic melding—one figure (the youth as classical symbol of death) is equivalent to another (Jesus as savior from death). This is salvation, not through faith or benevolent works, but through hermeneutics, through the proper reading of signs. The Singer’s movement from Greece to Palestine, his reading of Jesus as the equivalent figure of the classical aestheticized figure of death as a beautiful young man with an overturned torch in his hand, effectively melds past and present, classical and Christian, life and death. The Singer’s point seems to be that we must understand the paradox that Jesus is both death and life, in order to read the “comforting sign” properly. This is a theme that runs throughout the Hymns: death as a new form of life. What had once been sorrow and loss becomes now an object of desire or “sweet craving” (Süβer sehnsucht). Daylight, as the sign of material life, divides and individuates,

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while night, sleep, and its brother death are “timeless and spaceless” (Hymn 2), connecting and unifying all. And here we find the energy that drives this journey Eastward, the sweet longing or Sehnsucht for immediacy, unity, and wholeness without the shadow of loss. Following his performance for Jesus, the Singer continues his journey to the East, to “Indostan,” and through this quest completes Schiller’s fantasy of “the judgment of all minds . . . spoken through ours, the desire of all hearts . . . represented through our deed.” Der Sänger zog voll Fredigkeit nach Indostan—das Herz von süβer Liebe trunken; und schüttete in feurigen Gesängen es unter jenem milden Himmel aus, daβ tausend Herzen Sich zu ihn neigten, und die fröhliche Boschaft tausendzweigig emporwuchs. (1: 147) [The Singer passed along, full of joy, to Hindustan—his heart drunk with sweet love; and shook it out in fiery songs under that glad sky, so a thousand hearts bent to him and the glad tidings grew up thousand branching.] (Higgins 31)

In the course of a few lines he travels not only from West to East, but expands his role from Singer to a universal voice. He connects East and West, as he has already joined Classical and Christian, but more specifically achieves in the mysterious Indostan (Hindustan) what the West had been unable to accomplish—the spontaneous melding of a thousand hearts, as the “highest expansion of being.” Drunk on love, the Singer shakes out his heart in fiery songs. What in Palestine had been a matter of the proper reading of signs becomes farther East the very transcendence of the sign. This in itself explains why it is that Novalis can represent the Singer’s verses addressed to Jesus, while these fiery songs of Indostan remain irreproducible and untranslatable in their immediacy. The thousand hearts respond without need for discussion or contemplation and immediately reproduce the “glad tidings” exponentially and organically in a thousand branches more—as it were, “no longer individual, but universal.” In this way Novalis’s Orientalism functions as a geographic indicator of the temporal expansion that runs through the Hymns. Just as night is endless, Indostan is boundless. William O’Brien argues that in the Hymns “the night is the Romantic Absolute” in that it functions as a sign of what lies beyond articulation: “The infinite ground of appearance, beyond space and time, the Night can be neither present nor absent, and cannot appear as such” (263). As Said suggests, this “infinite” quality of the night is likewise a common trope of Romantic Orientalism that exceeds “European discreteness

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and rationality of time, space, and personal identity” (167). The journey to the East is also a journey into Night as well as a journey beyond the constraints of time itself. Indostan thus functions for Novalis not unlike what Alice Kuzniar identifies as the mode of the “future perfect” in the Hymns, the “stationing of ourselves in a future but still preliminary point in time” (94), which she also identifies in religious terms as the “apocatastasis—the reestablishment or recovery of the past at the end of time” (70). That is, as poet/prophet Novalis is not trying to predict specific future events as much as foresee a moment that can never arrive, that always will have been and thus persists in a timeless future. Just as the night can embody this mode of the endless temporally, the imaginary Indostan can perform a similar function in geographic terms as the space in which 1,000 hearts are one and time ceases to signify. Novalis’s fantasy of poetry set free from language, with fire as a replacement for words, anticipates a stanza from Byron’s third canto of Childe Harold in which the poet longs in vain for the very power the Singer attains in Indostan: Could I embody and unbosom now That which is most within me,—could I wreak My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw Soul—heart—mind—passions—feelings—strong or weak— All that I would have sought, and all I seek, Bear, know, feel—and yet breathe—into one word, And that one word were Lightning, I would speak; But as it is, I live and die unheard, With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword. (Byron 3: 97)

In the world of temporality and materiality, words do not take on the violent immediacy of lighting or fire, but must be spoken, written, translated, and interpreted. Hence the need of the Poet/Prophet to journey eastward to a realm beyond borders, to a magical site of intellectual intuition. Byron’s lightning, like Novalis’s “fiery songs,” functions as a metaphor of impossible immediacy, pointing to a transcendent sign that can never be read or heard in the real, or Western, world. In analyzing the “prophetic” in Novalis, Ian Balfour points out that the fragment “Monolog” specifically links prophecy to language that is immediate and spontaneous, unmediated by the speaker’s reflection: “a prophet who does not so much speak as moves his tongue or hand according to the machinations of the language itself” (Balfour 46). Homi Bhabha argues that the East, and India in particular, has

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often functioned within Western discourses as the site of this impossible or “senseless signifier” (125). Such signifiers, he suggests, “display the alienation between the transformational myth of culture as a language of universality and social generalization, and its tropic function as a repeated ‘translation’ of incommensurable levels of living and meaning” (125). If Western civilization translates inchoate and archaic signifiers into comprehensible and logical systems, appropriating the East to speak of the West, we find in Romantic ideology the complementary desire to mythologize the East as the realm in which being triumphs over meaning, the senseless over sense.

Shelley’s “Undiscovered Lands” Following the trail of Novalis’s “Singer,” Shelley’s mysterious Alastor “Poet” leaves “His cold fireside and alienated home / To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands” (76–77), traveling from Europe Eastward to Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, through the Desert of Karmin (in southeast Iran), across the Hindu Kush Mountains, to the “Vale of Kashmir” in northwest India (Reiman 77). Here again the apotheosis of the poetic requires a journey to the East, an escape from the West as realm of logic, division, specialization, and generally what Blake repeatedly calls “the ratio.” 9 Like Novalis’s Singer, the Poet thus reaches what was known as Indostan or “Hindustan,” where he has an experience that could not so easily occur in his “alienated” European home. Donald Reiman points out that we can read the Poet’s journey as a voyage backward in time toward the archaic origins of science and art, as it was commonly understood in the Orientalism of the late eighteenth century—a journey to a place even more originary than ancient Greece, back to the womb of civilization and myth itself.10 We can read “undiscovered” in this sense of beyond a Western world characterized by logic, reason, and knowledge rationally obtained and disseminated. Shelley’s fictional East is as undiscovered as Freud’s unconscious. As Novalis’s Singer had found in Indostan the possibility of moving beyond language to an immediate form of communication, Shelley’s Poet, in the Vale of Kashmir, is able to transcend the limits of materiality and of language itself. In this fantasy, Subject and Object become literally, if phantasmically, one. Of particular interest to the Romantic quest for an experience beyond space and time is the Poet’s encounter with a “veiled maid,” which takes place within what the narrator describes as a “vision,” a “dream,” and a “trance”—in other words, not simply in a realm of

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geographic alacrity, but within an altered, or “undiscovered” state of consciousness as well. Here mind and landscape merge. The Poet has traveled to the mysterious East, beyond the materialist and logical Europe of Descartes and Newton, back in time to a land before myth, and into the recesses of a repressed otherness of the unconscious. As Nicholas Birns puts it, within the Romantic ideology, “Kashmir is not the reservoir of an antiquarian past. The past that it contains is a visceral, primordial one . . . an omphalos of nutrient meaning” (348–49). The figurative possibilities of this fantastic version of the East allow Shelley to employ it as a space in which an encounter with primordial meaning becomes possible. Yet, the Alastor Poet does not so much encounter the origins of language in Kashmir, as dream of the possibility of the Ursprache itself—original meaning not simply in a distant and primordial past, but in an alternate present, in the parallel universe of the East. With the concept of Intellectual Intuition in mind, we can read it also as an erotic variation of “the highest expansion of being” that breaks down all barriers of individuality, time, and space, obviating the need for the “quest for origins” (Birns 346).11 Key to this reading of Shelley’s poem is that—freed from the constraints of Western logic, metaphysics, and religion—the Poet is no longer compelled to depend on sensual intuition, the encounter with objects in space, in order to gain knowledge, but is able to connect directly and intuitively—intellectually, following Shelley’s vocabulary in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” It is an epistemological encounter, which intensifies as it moves from speech to mathematics, to music, to a spiritualized copulation and orgasm with which the vision concludes: He dreamed a veiled maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thoughts: its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, Herself a poet. (ll. 151–61)

Like Novalis’s Singer, we begin with words and poetry—“talking in low solemn tones” (152); and the mysterious woman’s words have an identifiable themes: philosophy, political liberty, and poetry—the

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constant themes of Shelley’s own youth. But these distinct signs give way to “a permeating fire” in line 163 (as we have also seen in Novalis’s myth), as the veiled maid moves from words to “wild numbers.” She then grasps a “strange harp” (166) with which she begins a “strange symphony” accompanied by the audible beating of her heart. Here we follow Plato (see Book 6 of The Republic) as math and music lead us from the real to the ideal. Unlike Plato, however (but very much like portions of Novalis’s Hymns), Shelley represents the culmination of the journey to truth and beauty as a very clearly sexualized encounter that ends in orgasms:12 He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while, Then yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry. Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. (182–87)

The journey to the East culminates here in a journey, not just beyond language, but beyond the body itself as materiality “dissolves” and time and space no longer appear meaningful. As Frederick Neuhouser says of intellectual intuition, it is “nondiscursive in nature,” and therefore does not interpret or render a world of objects foreign to the Ego, but is “a simple unitary awareness” (84). Shelley’s Romantic Orientalism, as encounter with an exotic Other in a manner not possible in the “alienated” West, culminates with Homi Bhaba’s “senseless signifier”—the fantasy of nondiscursive communication. Within the Poet’s dream, language gives way to numbers, which become music, which finally appears as articulation only in an orgasmic “short breathless cry” (186), as the Poet “folded his frame in her dissolving arms” (187). In this fantasy of melding into oneness, the body and time cease, but only in the paradox of the temporary eternity that is intellectual intuition. For, as Schelling points out, attempting to continue in this altered state could only result in the dissipation and dissolution of the self: “If I were to maintain the intellectual intuition I would cease to live; I would pass ‘from time into eternity’ ” (1: 249, my translation).13 And so Shelley’s Poet wakes up and returns to himself, “roused by the shock he started from his trance” (192). Reading Shelley’s fantasy of the veiled maid in connection with German Idealism, as an erotic variation of intellectual intuition, draws attention to the passage as an example of semiotic melding. Despite the Platonic elevation from word to number to music, the erotic of the encounter do not present us with a simple escape from matter to

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form, or with the utter defacement of the body in favor of a spiritual transcendence of materiality. Rather, the Poet’s sexual encounter with the woman of the dream is a fantasy of the materiality of the sign, of the word becoming thing. The encounter represents an intensification of the body, rather than its denial.14 And this intensified body, with “glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil” (176), is able to communicate with an immediacy not possible within the limitations of human speech. It is not simply ecstatic oneness, as the Poet melds with his vision of the veiled maid, but semiotic in that it comprises that form of sympathetic understanding Shelley calls “love.” As he explains in his brief essay “On Love” (1818), human affection is not merely the longing for an object of desire, but the need to commune with a kindred soul: “If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s, if we feel we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own” (503). The fantasy of an erotic melting of bodies into one for Shelley is a part of “the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with every thing which exists” (504). Or, to quote Schiller again, “the judgment of all minds is spoken through ours, the desire of all hearts is represented through our deed.” In other words, this is an expansion of being in which we become one: no longer individual, material, and temporal, but universal, spiritual, and eternal. It is not difficult to see that the trope of the journey to the East not only survives through the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, but even at times expands and intensifies. Its variations have become so commonplace as to form easily recognizable clichés. In the twentieth century it figures particularly prominently after World War I and in the 1960s and 1970s. Consider the following passage from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922): They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was [sic] the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om—perfection. (translation Rosner 135–36)15

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Following his Romantic predecessors, Hesse lays particular emphasis on language. The talking river finally speaks to Siddhartha with Horn: Bhabha’s “senseless signifiers,” culminating in the greatest and most senseless of them all—Om. And “senseless” here should be understood not as “inane,” but as beyond the sensory, as “intellectual” in a Romantic sense. This is not merely a fantasy of oneness, but of the transcendence of the linguistic sign itself. Hesse’s “song of a thousand voices” resonates with Novalis’s “thousand hearts,” as both signify the universality of the moment of intuition. And it enacts again the transcendence of language from the connection between signifier and signified to a purely intellectual intuition firmly in a mythical and fictional East, in the place where the gap between signifier and signified, subject and object, life and death can find endless suspension; as Said puts it, “unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance.”

Notes 1. Gillen D”Arcy Wood’s introduction to The Shock of the Real provides a cultural reading of Belzoni’s Tomb. Jenkins is helpful on German Orientalism as well as Sir William Jones’s influence on Herder and Schlegel. The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit, and the old Persian might be added to this family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia. (The Sanskrit Language, 1786) 2. “Uns allen nämlich wohnt ein geheimes, wunderbares Vermögen bei, uns aus dem Wechsel der Zeit in unser Innerstes, von allem, was von auβenher hinzukam, entkleidetes Selbst zurückzuziehen, und da unter der Form der Unwandelbarkeit das Ewige in uns aunzunschauen. Diese Anschauung ist die innerste, eigneste Erfahrung, von welcher allen alles abhängt, was wir von einer übersinnlichen Welt wissen und glauben” (1, 1: 318).

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3. From Briefe Über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (1795): Diese intellektuale Anschauung tritt dann ein, wo wir für uns selbst aufhören Objeckt zu seyn, wo, in sich selbst zurückgezogen, das anschauende Selbst mit dem angeschauten identisch ist. In diesem Moment der Anschauung schwindet für uns Zeit und Dauer dahin: nicht wir sind in der Zeit, sondern die Zeit— oder vielmehr nicht sie, sonern die reine absolute Eqigkeit ist in uns. Nicht wir sind in der Anschauung der objecktiven Welt, sondern sie ist in unsrer Anschauung verloren. (1, 1: 319) 4. “Indem wir sagen, die Blume blühet und verwelkt, machen wir die Blume zum Bleibenden in dieser Verwandlung und leihen ihr gleichsam eine Person, an der sich jene beiden Zustände offenbaren” (SNA 20: 343). 5. “Mit unzerreiβbareb Babdebanden fesselt er [der sinnliche Trieb] den höher strebenden Geist an die Sinnenwelt, und von ihrer freiesten Wanderung ins Unendliche ruft er die Abstraktion in die Grenzen der Gegenwart zurück” (SNA 20: 345). 6. Wo also der Formtrieb die Herrschaft führt und das reine Objekt in uns handelt, da ist die höchste Erweiterung des Seins, da vershwinden alle Schranken, da hat sich der Mensh aus einer Gröβen-Einheit, auf welche der dürftige Sinn ihn beschränkte, zu einer Ideen-Enheit erhoben, die das ganze Reich der Erscheinungen unter sich faβt. Wir sind bei dieser Operation nicht mehr in der Zeit, sondern die Zeit ist in uns mit ihrer ganzen nie endenden Reihe. Wir sind nicht mehr Individuen, sondern Gattung; das Urtheil aller Geister ist durch das unsrige ausgesprochen, die Wahl aller Herzen ist repräsentirt durch unsre That. (20: 347) 7. On the influence of Herder and Schiller on Hymn 5, see Max Kommerell, “Novalis: Hymnen an die Nacht,” Novalis: Belträge zu Werk und Persönlichkeit Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970), 188; Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, “Einleitun der Herausgeber,” Novalis: Schriften, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlckhohn Verlag, 1960),118; and Rudolph Unger, Herder, Novalis und Kleist: Studien über die Entwickklung des Todesproblems in Denken und Dichten vom Sturm und Drang zur Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Moritz Diesterweg, 1922). 68. Like Blake, Novalis follows the Romantic urge to produce his own variation of a myth of fall and redemption. 8. “Der dichtende Philosoph, der philosophierende Dichter ist ein Prophet” (2: 207). 9. See “There is No Natural Religion,” for example: “Reason or the ratio of all we have already known is not the same that it shall be when we know more. . . . He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ration only sees himself only” (Erdman 2–3).

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10. Volney, in Ruins of Empire (1791), calls Ethiopia the “cradle of the sciences”(qtd. in Donald Reiman, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose [New York: Norton, 2002], 77). 11. Shelley’s description of the Poet’s dream of the veiled woman also offers striking similarities to the third of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night in which the spirit of the poet’s dead fiancée appears to him in a vision at her grave. 12. The elliptical description of the encounter has caused some disagreement about what actually transpires in sexual terms between the Poet and the Maid. Rajan believes, e.g., that the Poet “swoons rather than consummate[s] his love” (36), while Murphy clearly sees an erotic coupling (146). I concur with Murphy. 13. “Würde ich die intellektuale Anschauung fortsetzen, so würde ich aufhören zu leben.Ich ginge ‘aus der Zeit in die Ewigkeit!’ ” (1: 249) 14. The concept of the “intensification of the body” as a product of the discourse of the late eighteenth century comes from Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume I, in which he contrasts this intensification with the common perception of a suppression of the body and its urges (107). 15. alles war eins, alles war ineinander verwoben und verknüpft, tausendfach vershlungen. Und alles zusammen, alle Stimmen, alle Ziele, alles Sehnen, alle Leiden, alleLust, alles Gute und Böse, alles zusammen war die Welt. Alles zusammen war der Fluβ, des Geschehens, war die Musik des Lebens. Und wenn Siddhartha aufmerksam diesem Fluβ, diesem tausendstimmigen Liede lauschte, wenn er nicht auf das Leid noch auf das Lachen hörte, wenn er seine Seele nicht anirgendene Stimme band und mit senem Ich in sie einging, sondern alle hörte, das Ganze, die Einheit vernahm, dann stand das groβe Lied der tausend Stimmen aus einem einzigne Worte, das hieβ Om: die Vollendung. (5: 458)

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Chapter 12

We igh i ng It Ag a i n C h arl e s J. R z e p k a

I

n 1990, Nepal had a revolution. Barricades went up and troops fired on demonstrators. A curfew was declared. The airline pilots went on strike. My wife, Jane, and I and our two sons, ages eleven and thirteen, were on the last plane into Kathmandu the day the violence began. As we landed, dozens of pilots lined the runway, arms folded across their chests. Five days later, Nepal was a democracy.1 The gunfire ended and the curfew was lifted. There was, literally, dancing in the streets and the Rzepkas joined in. It was our last day in the capital. In a narrow alley packed with celebrants, Jane and I came to a stall displaying metal pots. It was tended by a slim adolescent boy, quick and graceful as a bird, and proficient in English—which was probably why his parents had put him in charge. His beauty made us glad. A brown copper pot caught our attention. “How much?” Jane asked, pointing to it. The boy did not hesitate, and named his price. As seasoned travelers we knew that our next move was to underbid, and then converge on agreement. So we made our offer. “No, no, no”—the boy said, and hefted the pot. “We charge by weight.” Jane and I looked at each other, and then looked at the pot, and then at the boy. “No, I don’t think so,” Jane said, and we began to walk away. “Stop, stop!” called the boy. We turned. “I weigh it again!” he said.

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Unlike a certain Romantic poet encountering the innumeracy of a Welsh cottage girl, we did not feel obliged to teach our young counter-clerk better math. As they say in the leadership seminars, his quick thinking had helped us “get to ‘yes.’ ” That is an attractive goal in business, as in most walks of life. Everyone leaves satisfied. In the academic professions, however, as we all know, trying too hard to “get to yes” can be dangerous, encouraging the growth of mutual admiration societies, coteries, and “old-boy” (and today, “old-girl”) networks.2 And the danger is more acute in matters of fact than of interpretation, because matters of fact rest upon descriptions of the material objects that are the bedrock of our profession: the tablet, the scroll, the codex, the manuscript, the book; the stylus, the pen, the typefont, the ink and paper, the press, the layout; the scene of composition, writing, printing, dissemination, and reception; and the circumambient world in which these scenes, and those that writers depict, unfold. While I would not go as far as a colleague of mine, who insists that we are becoming a culture of “nice-ness,” we do at times somnambulate toward “yes,” even in matters of fact. But why? For many reasons. Perched on the cusp of tenure or promotion, we may find discretion the better part of valor. Sometimes it is just easier to say “yes”—more pleasant all around. Most of the time, however, our failure of skepticism, our disinclination to test for error, arises from the unreflective practice of two otherwise honorable virtues: enthusiasm and trust. The first—enthusiasm—keeps inquiry alive; the second—trust—keeps it efficient, helping us to leverage the collective wisdom of our discipline as we seek to augment it. Factual errors are often committed under the influence of the first of these virtues—enthusiasm—and perpetrated under the influence of the second—trust, typically aided and abetted by impatience—never a virtue in any walk of life. Ezra Pound once likened good writing to sanitary surgery: first and foremost, he cautioned, keep your bandages clean!3 More simply, as Hippocrates put it: “Do no harm.” Nowhere in our field is this imperative more important than when we are asserting matters of fact about the objects we handle every day. An error of fact can multiply like a bacterium, though it may cause the original patient nothing worse than a runny nose. In the worst cases, it can induce fever and hallucination, and spread into a discipline-shifting epidemic: mistake Tintern’s “ouzy tide” of silt for pollution, and three decades of Romanticists will be hitting Wordsworth upside the head for ignoring industrial symptoms of war.4 Most disturbing, perhaps, is when the germ of factual error reaches the classroom, where its

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victims are unlikely to stick around long enough for an antibiotic to be administered—supposing one were discovered in time. We will never find a vaccine for factual error, but we can cure or at least quarantine it by restraining our enthusiasm, cultivating patience, and weighing facts again, or rather, weighing—examining, measuring, tallying, relocating, redescribing—the objects about which facts have been asserted. All is well and good—who would deny it? But how do we get at objects in order to weigh them? From which direction do we approach and which handle do we grab? And on whose scales will the assay begin? How do we even agree on the objects to be weighed? How do we begin to describe them, from whose perspective, using whose diction and discourse? In short, how do we refer to objects? Can we refer to them? Many proponents of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and critical theory would insist that we cannot, that the differance of “archewriting” determines and restricts our discrimination of objects, leaving us locked inside what Fredric Jameson famously called a “prisonhouse of language.” As Elizabeth A. Clark puts it, “If the ‘real’ is known only in and through its discursive construction, as established by an intra-linguistic system of differences, how could historians assume (as they customarily had) the adequacy of words to refer to things?” (5–6). But even supposing we can refer to objects, and describe them, how do we take the next, crucially important step—how do we justify the statements and narratives we attach to them? How do we arrive at “yes” and still protect the object’s material integrity while pursuing all the protracted negotiations of attribution, description, and story we need to get there? The best way to begin answering these questions, I think, is with an object like my Nepalese pot. Imagine me, if you will, placing it here, in front of you, pushing aside this book to make you look at it (see figure 12.1). Doing so would by no means be as dramatic as placing a jar in Tennessee, as Wallace Stevens once did, or says he did, in “Anecdote of the Jar.” But Stevens’s poem captures what is at stake when we “place” anything, anywhere: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.

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Nepalese pot.

The jar was round upon the ground And all and of a port in air. It took dominion every where. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Although our subject is “Romantic Objects,” Stevens can, with some legitimacy, be considered America’s “Last Romantic” even if we concede to Yeats the British title. “Anecdote of the Jar” is, as Helen Vendler

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pointed out (The Odes of John Keats 45), a gentle parody of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” If this “bride” is ‘‘still unravished,” however, it may be because she offers so little to arouse a wooer’s imagination—no “marble men and maidens overwrought,” no “melodies unwearied,” no “green altar” or “mysterious priest.” So too, my pot, like Stevens’s jar, is merely “round [ . . . ] and bare.” But it is also brown, not “gray”; short, not “tall”: my pot’s unadorned features are easily discriminated, distinguishing it from Keats’s urn as well as Stevens’s jar once I “place” it in front of you. But before addressing the questions by whom or for whom these properties are being discriminated, for what purpose, and in whose interest and using what language—in short, before I ask the question, “Whose ‘dominion’5 is being asserted at this ‘where’ ”?—let me ask another: What does it mean to “place” something any “where”? Let alone “in” an entire state? What is the “where,” the “ ‘Tennessee,” “in” which Stevens’s jar has been “placed”? Clearly, it is not a bag or a box or similar physical container. Is it a yellow parallelogram on a map? A vast surface of dirt and plants reaching past the visible horizon? A political abstraction? What else is “in” Stevens’s Tennessee? Cities? Railroads? Highways? Farms? Apparently not. There is only the “slovenly wilderness” and a “hill” that, once it is placed there, the jar somehow forces the wilderness to “surround.” Oddly, the poet does not say he placed the jar upon “that hill” in Tennessee—a locution that would make more apparent sense, conforming as it does to our ordinary use of the word “place” with respect to material objects, like jars or pots or urns. The difficulties in making sense of Stevens’s first line multiply the more we attempt to dispel them. Try to imagine the action it depicts: where is the “I” standing as he (let us make it Stevens himself) places the jar? Inside or outside Tennessee? Perhaps he is standing on a bridge spanning the Mississippi River, between Tennessee and Arkansas. In the middle of the bridge is a fat white line. He stands to the west of the line and, leaning over, places the jar to the east of the line. But then, where is the hill? In the middle of the bridge? No—Stevens must be in the wilderness to begin with (no bridges, no roads) and standing next to a hill (how could he place the jar there otherwise?) near a stone wall, let us say, marking the boundary line of Kentucky and Tennessee. But no again. If he is truly in the wilderness, he will find no trace of civilization, its walls, its habitations. Perhaps he means something else by the word “place”? What if we think of “placing” as a mental event, in the sense of “I couldn’t quite place her” or “Can you place the suspect at the scene of the crime?” Then we need not sojourn through the hinterlands of

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trans-Appalachia with our jar, looking for a Tennessee in which to set it down. “I placed a jar in Tennessee” simply means “I remembered having seen it there,” or “I connected it in my mind with a hill in Tennessee.” In short, “I recognized it,” “I identified it as the jar that . . . ” and we add the appropriate relative clause: “that took dominion,” “that did not give of bird or bush.” In short, we attach a narrative to it, a poetic narrative perhaps, an “Anecdote of the Jar.” In this reading it makes no difference where the speaker was standing when he “placed” a jar in Tennessee—he could be standing in Arkansas, Tennessee, or any other state of the Union. But these recollective scenarios are little more persuasive than those we have envisioned for “place” as a verb of physical action, with the poet standing on a bridge over the Mississippi or next to a wall on the Kentucky border. The problem in this case lies in the indefinite article, the “a,” in the first line. When we mentally “place” something, we already have a specific something in mind—something we have experienced in the past. “I placed the jar”—“the suspect,” “that girl”—“I last saw it in Tennessee,” “he was at the scene of the crime,” “she was from the old neighborhood.” “The jar” of Stevens’s title has earned its definite article through the very “anecdote” of placing, of singling out “a” jar that the poem is about to relate. Physically, however, it is easy to “place” any one of many similar objects chosen at random: if you want to place a jar, any jar will do. Once a jar is placed, however, once it becomes the specific jar chosen from among the general category of jars to be placed, in Tennessee or elsewhere, then we can begin to discriminate it, extrinsically, as an object distinct from others of its class, by discriminating it intrinsically—analyzing it, breaking it down into its constituent properties—“gray,” not brown; “bare,” not “overwrought” with engravings; “tall,” not “short”; “round,” not square; and open at one end—“of a port in air.” In addition, its particular location can be specified: “upon a hill.” Which hill? That, too, could be specified, but is not necessary. Stevens has made his point: by invoking both the physical and the mental activities we associate with the word “placed” he has indicated their basic interdependence. Physically placing an object is what enables anyone, subsequently, in memory or in discourse (for Stevens, in his proleptic title), to “place” it as the object we have in mind—and I mean, “we.” When I physically place an object “in” any “where,” it takes “dominion every where,” for all observers. It draws attention to itself and subtly redraws our awareness of everything else—that “slovenly wilderness” of indiscriminate awareness that we call our lived

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experience—so as to make “that wilderness surround” the object—or rather its site (“that hill” and no other). Once placed at a site, the object makes the shared world emerge in determinate relation to it. To “place” the object physically is thus to initiate a gathering—of attention, of acts of discrimination, of a location specifiable with respect to other objects and to other persons understood as material objects, as human bodies in space and time—a gathering, in short, that is both intersubjective and present. “I placed a jar in Tennessee”: before the jar I placed becomes an object with specifically discernable physical—and aesthetic—properties, before it becomes this jar, gray, bare, round, “upon a hill,” and so on, it is an object of the verb “to place,” or rather, not an object (except in the strictly grammatical sense) but more a thing-to-beplaced. We tend to use the terms object and thing interchangeably, but as Bill Brown, the original “thing theorist,” reminds us, things are no more than “the entifiable that is unspecified,” an “illegible remainder” that is “retroprojected” by one’s encounter with an intelligible object (Things 5). “A jar,” then, is only relatively unspecifiable: it belongs to the class of “jars,” but is not identified as a unique referent bearing features separating it from other members of its class as an object of sense—“the jar that. . . . ” If we consider unspecifiability in this way as a matter of degree then the word “thing” epitomizes the general class of all relatively unspecifiable objects, all objects that are not at the present moment materially realized as referents because they are not currently being “placed.” “Thingness,” in short, is relative. It must be. If it were not, if things were absolutely unspecifiable, we could not speak of them in the plural, or for that matter, speak of them (or it) at all. According to several current accounts of reference, we cannot, and do not, speak of real things, or of real objects for that matter, even when we think we do. Those who propose and endorse these accounts believe that if we are to make the “thing” an intelligible object of sense, if we are to make it present, we must first crank it through the wringer of discourse and culture—let us call this the “discursive/cultural system” or DCS for short—thereby foreclosing all access to “thingness” except from within the horizons of understanding, as Hans-Georg Gadamer would call them, imposed by the DCS into which each of us was born and within which each of us has grown up. For some, the occlusion of the “thing” begins before we even approach the horizons of a specific discourse or culture. As Derrida would insist with respect to language, Lacan with respect to the Symbolic, and Althusser with respect to social practice in general, even within a common DCS,

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individuals subjected to the endless deferrals of differance or “the mirror stage” or interpellation by the Ideological State Apparatus cannot know things, let alone other subjects, or even themselves. Period. They can only know things, others, and themselves as objects mediated by a common discourse and ideology. In short, “things” can never be “present.” But the fact that things are unspecifiable does not mean they are either unpresentable or unplaceable. On the contrary, their stubbornly unspecifiable material remainder, their “thingness,” if you will, is what enables them to be placed physically, an act that is foundational to their being placed mentally—remembered, conceptualized as immaterial objects of thought and, ultimately, as discursive and cultural signifieds. Indeed, the physical act of placing things, of making them “present” or “present-ing” them, which necessarily puts them in an immediate, functional relation to one’s own body and the bodies of others, is the ultimate condition of the possibility of things becoming specifiable objects for multiple subjects within a single DCS and across DCS horizons— that is, for their becoming intersubjectively discriminable as present objects of sense. “Anecdote of the Jar” is about placing as an act that transforms a generically recognizable “thing” into a uniquely discriminated object of perception. As Heidegger reminds us, the word “thing” comes from the common English and Scandinavian root word for “gathering” or “assembly.” “The thing things,” he writes, and “[t]hinging gathers” (172). In Icelandic, the “thingfellir,” or Parliament, is the place of gathering. The thing, similarly, begins to exert its ever-widening “dominion,” its power of “gathering,” at the site where it is placed or made present—“present-ed,” if you will: a formative vortex, “a port in air,” some “where” whose relation to the perceiving subject, even while not yet specified objectively, can still be localized in relation to his or her body, either through immediate contact or through some material, instrumental means. At these sites, the thing “gathers” (Wordsworth and Coleridge would have said, “associates”) the qualities, properties, concepts, and ideas to be discriminated in the form of a particular “object.” It also “gathers” subjectivities: it is the site where they intersect. This makes of “intersubjectivity” nothing more than the horizon of experience comprising all points where subjective spheres of consciousness intersect in present-ed things, including the bodies of others. These points of intersection are “thing-sites,” if you will. They emerge from within the subject’s realm of experience, and begin to “take dominion every where,” through the simple, physical

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placing or present-ing of things, which necessarily locates them in relation to all other embodied human subjects. This understanding of intersubjective “placing,” “thing-sites,” and “present-ing” relies on a growing consensus among linguists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists regarding the fundamental role of cross-culturally significant gestures, such as pointing, placing, reaching, and beckoning, as a “protolanguage” or “paralanguage” offering a “platform” for the emergence of a specifically linguistic, culturally inflected form of reference.6 According to Michael Argyle, despite inevitable variations in locomotor expression and a vast range of cultural inflections, twelve gestures appear to be “very common, or universal” in meaning among all human societies. These include pointing, the halt sign, and beckoning (53). To these I would add the motion of holding something out toward another person, a gesture upon which the meaning of pointing obviously relies. These gestures are universally understood because unlike the words of a language they arise, directly and without any other material mediation, from the body that all interlocutors do not just “possess” or “have” or “use,” like a formal language, but are. The act of pointing—an abbreviated form of “placing”—takes a material form; but it is not itself a material sign, except in the most trivial sense. Pointing does not “stand for” or “refer” to a signified in the manner of a verbal signifier: it does not, for instance, “mean” “pointing.” Similarly, unlike formal languages, the paralanguage of placing lacks rules of “correct” usage: it has no syntax, no lexemes, no “parts” tagged for a restricted range of combinations. It is incapable of making propositions about things or events, and it “refers” without having a specific referential content or signified, which is to say, placing indicates or invites—to “place” a jar in Tennessee is to indicate, invite, call another’s attention to a “thing-site,” a location where intersubjective discriminations of the object across the horizons of subjective experience and of the DCS that each subject inhabits can begin to be negotiated through other acts of “placing” that “gather”—group, juxtapose, replace—other things at the same site: grayness, bareness, roundness; a hill, a wilderness. These gatherings set up relations among objects, and between objects and more “iconic” paralinguistic gestures for “eating,” “sleeping,” “walking,” or “looking,” as well as verbal utterances.7 The paralanguage of “placing” thus frames or makes possible a dyadic reciprocity between subjects that is the foundation of formal speech. It derives and persists from our earliest attempts to make sense of the “thingness” of the world, which begins at birth, the instant when we first achieve separation from that world. And the first object

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that we begin to discriminate at what we might call the foundational “thing-site” of infant experience (“infant” from the Latin for “lacking speech”) is the body of the mother and its (her) parts. Research on mother/infant communication has taken enormous strides in the last decade and a half. We now recognize in the newborn, and not just in the mother, varying degrees of intentionality and reciprocity, distinct periods of encoding and decoding, rhythms of initiation and response, and the deliberate prolongation of initially reflexive actions—reaching, striking, grasping, eye movement—as well as pre-cultural expressions of emotion and pre-lingual vocalizations leading to what Colin Trevarthen calls “protoconversations” (129–33) all beginning within the first few weeks of life. These features of mother/infant paralingual communication are, like similar paralingual gestures, universal across cultures, as are those of what researchers have come to call “motherese”—the high, restricted pitch-range and limited syllabary of the mother’s vocalizations, for instance, or the closed array of gestures, including tactile—she uses to initiate or prolong paralingual contact with her baby. From this limited exchange of gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations, including gestures of “placing,” accompanied by the gradual imposition of voluntary control over facial and other reflexes, the infant begins to enter the intersubjective world of objects discriminated in common, including itself as an embodied subject—an object for other subjects. Before we have objects or subjects, then, we have “thing-sites,” and before we have plural “thing-sites” we have the originary “thingsite”—the mother’s body. This is the first object that is “placed” for the newborn—or rather, that places itself in order to draw—or gather—the infant’s attention and, just as important, to elicit those specific emotional and locomotor responses that will, eventually, enable the infant to begin “placing” things as objects for him- or herself, as well as for others, both mentally and discursively (Trevarthen 156–58). Reading Stevens’s “Anecdote” as allegory, we could say that the mother’s body is the “jar” that, once it is “placed,” makes the “slovenly wilderness” of the infant’s undifferentiated experience “surround” it, “no longer wild,” but organized into discriminable, locatable objects in a shared world. Space limitations prevent my exploring this research further here. I invoke it only to question the still prevalent assumption that we cannot discriminate objects at thing-sites in common, that we cannot experience the “presence” of things, without relying upon the prediscriminatory intercession of language, or the DCS. Do any of

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us really believe that only language-users can discriminate one object from another, or one feature from another within a given object? Or that learning to discriminate new objects, or new properties in them, is restricted to the categories imposed on our experience of the world by language or the DCS? Not only do infants learn within weeks of birth to discriminate mother from others, but we also know from everyday experience that many animals without the least understanding of language, even simple commands, are capable of precise and sophisticated object discriminations and of shaping their behavior accordingly. But exactly how does “gathering,” in and of itself, enable objective (i.e., shared) discriminations of features within the thing as well as between one thing and another, without at some point forcing observers to call upon the supplement of language? Consider immersion techniques for language acquisition, where speaking in one’s native tongue is strictly forbidden. Thus, I point to the thing, or rather, I point to the site, I “place” the thing at a site, where an act of object discrimination is to “take place.” But once I have directed your attention to the thing-site, do I not need to name what I am pointing to in order to allow you to enter my DCS-determined horizon of experience? I place a pot on a table, and say, “pot”; but how do I know that you and I are discriminating the same material object at this shared thing-site? Perhaps you really see and understand “brown,” or “hound,” or “copper,” or “of a port in air.” How do I test for that possibility? By fastening more words to the object we are trying to discriminate? No. I place, I gather, more things at the same site until, through successive acts of comparison and contrast, we begin to understand each other. This is, in fact, the precise method of the software language-learning program Rosetta Stone, which never displays only one object or event at the “site” of the computer screen, but four, for purposes of comparing and contrasting classes of objects and isolating their specific features or subclasses: color, size, shape, age, sex, and so on. In short, discrimination of the object at the thing-site can precede naming, although all acts of naming necessarily affect our powers of discrimination. Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge taught us that we live in “worlds not realized,” which I take to include “objects not realized”; inchoate things awaiting discrimination as objects. They believed we could see infinity in a grain of sand, the extraordinary in the ordinary, and vice versa. But we need not go to the poets to refute the claims of lexical hegemonists by stripping away, as Shelley put it, the veil of familiarity from familiar objects. Evidence of the active, everyday, linguistically

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unmediated, and above all original discrimination of new objects, and of new features in old objects, is all around us. In fashion design, in wine-making, in cuisine, in pop music, in painting, even in the repainting of your living room, you can learn to discriminate new objects of sense and their specific shades, nuances, and degrees of color, ante, pitch, timbre, rhythmic and melodic and harmonic complexity by a simple process of “gathering”—usually, of comparison and contrast (color wheels, musical scales). You do not taste the tannin in this cabernet? Here, taste this one and compare—what is missing? That is what enologists call “tannin.” You may call it whatever you like, now that you have learned to discriminate it. But what good does it do us, committed as we are to the profession of English language and literature, to place things physically, as discriminated objects of present sensory experience, when our job is precisely to “place” them derivatively, conceptually, and recollectively, in the autonomous, mediating grids of discourse, culture, and history? That is the real challenge, is it not? For explanatory narratives—the “anecdotes” we would attach to things, like the one Stevens attaches to his jar and the one I just attached to my Nepalese pot—are almost infinitely malleable under the hammers of interpretation. When it comes to interpreting material objects, as opposed to placing and presenting them, anything is possible. But not all possibilities are equally probable. In advancing interpretations, we can only deal with the probable, to various degrees, including—as Barker-Benfield so ably demonstrates in his essay on Shelley’s guitar—the probability or improbability of provenance, the lines of descent we have traced for the material clues, whether original documents or tuning pegs, from which we would derive a literary history. A provenance, too, must take a narrative form. Meanwhile, however, the material thing endures, patiently awaiting new acts of “placing” and discrimination. Inevitably, the objectdiscriminations its re-placing incites will be shaped by the questions we wish to put to it, and these questions, in turn, will be shaped by the narratives about similar objects, discriminated at similar sites, that are an inextricable part of our discursive/cultural inheritance. These narratives, both oral and written, will have been influenced by the outcomes of power struggles and ideological conflicts between classes, races, genders, and generations over the course of centuries. As has often been said, history is written by the winners. And yet, the very things—letters, books, journals, diaries, minutes, charts, maps, constitutions, deeds, chronicles, ruins, monuments, topographies, diplomata, epigraphs, coins—all these things that the winners would

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cite as evidence of the narrative “truths” that restrict what the losers can say about them wait to be re-placed, reexamined, weighed again, often against newly placed (discovered, gathered-juxtaposed) things. No merely conceptual, no merely discursive placing of the material thing as a discriminated object can stand as final if it takes place exclusively within the closed horizon of a DCS or one of its clannish subsets, because material things can always be placed, physically, across those horizons, and discriminated as objects from other, often quite contrary, perspectives, by subjects posing other, often quite unanticipated, questions. Our existence as a profession and as a discipline depends utterly on this stubborn, intersubjective persistence of thingness in the material objects over whose stories we will inevitably disagree, to one extent or another. My faith in a universal, intersubjective foundation for the discrimination of things as sensory objects in acts of “placing” inclines me to want to qualify arguments such as those offered by my coplenary contributor Judith Pascoe in her wonderful new book, The Hummingbird Cabinet. There she says that the best way to challenge the winners’ version of history is to let “collected objects float free of their possessors and come to exist in inscrutable isolation, defying the scholar’s efforts to recast them as definitive evidence” (23). By letting the object detach itself from knowledge-claims in this way, Pascoe argues, we can begin to untangle it from the ideological tentacles of coterie historiography, and in particular, of a predominantly masculinist positivism. Thus liberated from illusions of “mastery,” the object can incite what she calls “self-sustaining fantasies,” speculations “founded on harmless (or ineffectual) forms of control,” as opposed to the “pursuit of dominance” (173). I think this is an excellent description of where all responsible scholarship should begin, but not of where it should aim to end up. And I suspect Pascoe would agree: the “fantasies” incited by her suggestive array of objects do not float very far before drawing taut the anchor-ropes of scrupulous citation and informed observation. As The Hummingbird Cabinet demonstrates repeatedly, without the power of the imagination, of reverie and fantasy, we cannot get beyond our habituated ways of perceiving objects, nor conceive questions to put to them that do not already have answers provided by our own, historically determined discursive/cultural system or subsystem. What some call “dominance,” however, others (myself included) view as a perilous and abject (but necessary) “subservience” to the material evidence of history and to the limits (practical or probable) that it imposes on the scholarly imagination. Not a month passes, I would

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bet, without some literary historian, somewhere, discovering that what he or she took to be a matter of objective, material fact turns out to have been a “self-sustaining fantasy” and nothing more. It is always frustrating not to be heard, humiliating to be silenced. The best solution to being ignored or silenced, however, is to seek to widen, deepen, and variegate the “gathering” around the thing that has been “placed” in question. Opening more pathways to the gathering place, inviting more participants: this is vital to sound scholarship. If we are to survive not only as a profession, but as a discipline, we must continue to enlarge, as much as possible, the intersubjective horizon whose center lies every “where” that the thing in question is to be discriminated as—which is to say into—an object. Only when all have been invited can the real work begin. What is that real work? I said that “thing” was Old English for “assembly,” but it is also the word for what an assembly is expected to do once it has gathered: to deliberate, to argue, to compare and contrast, to make and to challenge cases for and against individual opinions and impressions. To set them afloat, yes, but also to weigh them again. If we wish to consider a truly self-sustaining fantasy we could hardly do better than Fred Ankersmit’s notion of “historical experience.” In the course of nearly 400 pages seeking to elucidate what he means by this phrase in his recent book, Sublime Historical Experience, Ankersmit succeeds admirably in enumerating nearly everything “historical experience” is not, while knowingly—and unapologetically—contradicting himself in the process. “Historical experience” is neither the intersubjective give-and-take of informed historiographical opinion, nor an exercise of the individual historian’s informed imagination. It makes no claims to objective authority, for in “historical experience” subject and object dualism simply vanishes: even an uninformed child, says Ankersmit, could have an authentic “historical experience” of an object from the past, which carries with it an overwhelming conviction of its authenticity. This conviction cannot be tested against any outside criterion, because the fundamental condition of the possibility of “historical experience” is, for Ankersmit, its absolute decontextualization, its floating free of every conceivable “epistemological grid,” to use his own terminology, whether of language, reception, or cognition. Faced with so much that remains private and unverifiable in such a concept, one reviewer, John Henry Zammito of Rice University, has dismissed it as an invitation to “rampant self-indulgence,” adding, “the sublime cannot become the basis of normal historical practice” (167).

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But this is a point that Ankersmit himself pugnaciously concedes. “Historical experience,” he says, “is of no use whatsoever to the practice of historiography or the discipline of historical research.” His models of authenticity are drawn, accordingly, not from historians, but from artists: Van Gogh, Proust, Beethoven, Holderlin. The truth of “historical experience” is, for Ankersmit, clearly an aesthetic truth, and if one is a British Romanticist, one cannot help but think of Keats, repeatedly, as one reads his book: the poet’s impatience with “consequitive reasoning,” his embrace of self-annihilation, his exaltation of the beautiful and the sublime to the level of a truth felt upon one’s pulses, not to mention the vivid realization of Ankersmit’s notion of “historical experience” represented by The Fall of Hyperion, where a naive but powerful Titanic culture is completely erased from the collective memory of its enlightened Olympian successor, only to be rescued by the songs of the inspired Apollonian poet. Ankersmit’s “aesthetic turn” protracts a tendency evident in a wide range of philosophy, literary criticism, and historiography of the last decade or two, a weariness with the clanking chains of traditional disciplinarity that has led Jacques Derrida in The Post Card and Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity to reject the unsustainable day-dreams of reason and embrace the more recognizably “self-sustaining fantasies” of art. “The later Derrida,” says Rorty approvingly, “privatizes his philosophical thinking. [ . . . ] He simply drops theory [ . . . ] in favor of fantasizing about [his] predecessors”—in The Post Card this means Socrates and Plato. “There is no moral to these fantasies,” Rorty continues, “nor any public (pedagogical or political) use to be made of them” (97). Late Derrida thus joins Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell in Rorty’s literary pantheon of “ironist theorizing” (97), which pledges its allegiance not to the beauty of truth, but to the infinitely fascinating “play” of associations that cluster about it like a nimbus—the truth of beauty that Rorty, drawing on Derrida, calls “style.” Although “falling back on private fantasy” (97), as Rorty puts it, seems to offer pedagogues little or nothing to do, teachers and scholars of literature can still, in his view, assume a modest advisory role, if only because our “exceptionally large range of acquaintance” with exemplary literary ironists enables us to familiarize our students with literature’s vast variety of “alternative” cultures and vocabularies. In the Rortian future of ironist theorizing, where fantasies and not facts are what matter, our job will be the equivalent of staffing the circulation desk at the local library and making recommendations to inquisitive patrons. Any expertise we may profess in the skills of reading,

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let alone in the history of literature and criticism, all of which we can now, apparently, jettison for the pleasures of private fantasizing, will prove nugatory. Indeed, Rorty expresses astonishment at “the way intellectuals got jobs in universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties” (8l)—such as Romanticism, I suppose. Rorty’s commitment to radical self-determination is at one with his promotion of ironism, and he identifies both, and himself, as Romantic. “The generic task of the ironist,” he writes, “is the one Coleridge recommended to the great and original poet: to create the taste by which he will be judged. But the judge the ironist has in mind is himself” (97). As a self-confessed middle-class, Western—and Romantic—liberal, Rorty is committed to the free exchange of ideas and the reduction of cruelty, which must be why I enjoy reading him despite my misgivings about his radical anti-foundationalism. Clearly, I have a long way to go before reaching his level of comfort with the idea of abandoning the pursuit of fact (sorry, the illusion of fact) for fantasy. But even a teacher or a scholar only “pretending” to pursue British Romanticism might feel impelled to point out that, as a matter of fact, Wordsworth, not Coleridge, made that statement about original artists in his “Essay Supplementary” of 1815, and he said that they create the taste by which they are to be “enjoyed,” not “judged.” Rorty’s first error (if we can charge an “error” to an ironist who recognizes only the “play” of descriptive vocabularies) is negligible— Wordsworth attributes the statement originally to Coleridge, and does it really matter who said what? (Coleridge, inveterate plagiarist that he was, would have been the first to deny it.) But the second error is serious; because it shows that, far from abandoning the traditional mandate of philosophy, which is to invite or challenge judgments, Rorty has simply reassigned that task, after radically introverting it, to art, whose job, according to the Romantics, was above all to provide pleasure, not invite judgment. For Wordsworth, however, judgment—perhaps especially self-judgment in the form of second-guessing—is a faculty tending naturally to division and to puffing up pride of nation and class. It generally stands in the way of pleasure. Giving pleasure is the highest duty of the artist, and when the old modes of doing so have been worn out and reduced to mechanical devices working in concert with judgment for the accumulation of social or cultural capital, then it is time for the artist to offer new modes of pleasing us, by enabling us to perform extraordinary new object-discriminations among the generically undifferentiated things we “see but do not observe” (to borrow a wonderful phrase from Sherlock Holmes8). The artist’s job is to

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shake us out of what Wordsworth called in his “Intimations Ode” the “worlds not realised” through which we sleepwalk our everyday lives, and help us realize new worlds. Literary critics and scholars are not artists; or at least, art is not what they profess as Romanticists. They profess the study of art, and specifically, the art of literature, including its objects and their histories. And the same is true, mutatis mutandem, of academic historians such as Fred Ankersmit, despite his attempts to convey the “sublime historical experience” of Guardi’s Venetian punicinellas. For that matter, even Richard Rorty died a professional academic (or at least, “pretending” to be one) in the pay of Stanford, and not (to my knowledge) a novelist or a poet. Artists create beauty and sublimity by defamiliarizing the familiar; the rest of us, if we are lucky, get to experience and appreciate these miraculous transformations and, if we are very lucky, we get paid to explain and interpret them. When we give pleasure, it is not unalloyed with judgment, if not of literary taste than of factual plausibility. For that reason the pleasure we give is not entirely immune to the artificial distinctions and snobbery to which, as Wordsworth knew, judgment naturally lends itself to the detriment of pleasure. Nonetheless, despite our not being artists, there is a kind of sublimity attainable even by ordinary, “Dryasdust” Casaubons like us, who may possess not a shred of poetic intuition or an inkling of what “ironist theorizing” is or a “sublime historical experience” would, or should, feel like. It is an altogether more pedestrian affair than what the likes of Derrida, Rorty, or Ankersmit have in mind, but worthy of admiration in its kind and degree. It is not for the faint of heart, nor for ironists. None of us wish to see our most cherished beliefs, not to mention our proudest accomplishments, challenged, let alone overturned. But placing things, whether in the here and now or in discourse, inevitably opens the door to such an outcome; for it elicits responses that are, fundamentally, unpredictable. And because we are programmed from birth to seek responses through acts of placing and to respond in turn, we are fated to become “response-able” whether we will or no—responsible to, and for, others. As responsible creatures, we are forced to act on probabilities, not, as in the case of Ankersmit’s “historical experience,” absolute (because untested) certainties, nor, as in the case of Rortian ironism, playful suppositions. As professionals we “profess” not absolute, but moral certainty—what is known in criminal law as persuasion “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The legal test of whether or not a doubt is reasonable is whether or not it prevents

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you from acting on what you believe—in a criminal trial, from giving your individual verdict of guilt. Clearly, with the responsibility attached to judgments based only on probabilities, there sometimes comes great risk. If the person you convict of murder is executed but turns out to have been innocent, who then has blood on his hands? For Romanticists, as for literary scholars, teachers, and critics in general, the consequences of our deliberate judgments are rarely, if ever, so dire. They can, however, be painful, both for those who take us at our word and for us who give it. I began with a poem about placing a jar in Tennessee. I end with a poem about an urn that is unplaceable. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—the allusive object of Stevens’s “Anecdote”—seems to epitomize Pascoe’s, Rorty’s, and Ankersmit’s ideal investigative methodology. It deliberately suspends questions of “thingness,” letting the object “float free” of an intersubjectively determined historical narrative for the purpose of enhancing our appreciation of the sheer truth of its beauty. It conforms particularly to Ankersmit’s concept of a “sublime historical experience”—in this case, Keats’s rapturous, if historiographically under-informed, intuition of classical Greece. The poem’s topologically opposed bas-relief scenes—youthful erotic pursuit and mature civic sacrifice—meet discursively at the copular comma that links the two sides of Keats’s famous chiasmus, the “motto” of the urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The subjective “beauty” of an unfading object of desire, a scene of “marble men and maidens overwrought” and captured in an eternal moment of unconsummated lust, is “true because it is unchanging—ever about to be consummated and never actually consumed. But the eternal, intersubjective “truth” of sacrifice, its collective tragedy or “goat song”—from the Greek, “tragos” + “oidos,” referring to the sacrificial victim or singing prize of the rites offered to Dionysus according to some etymologies9 —is “beautiful,” or if you will, “sublime,” because it demands that the victim remain “true” to his or her sacrificial destiny: doomed to err, we yet stand up for what we believe to be the truth. Like the Dionysian goat, Keats’s heifer lowing at the skies is merely a substitute for the human victim traditionally associated with the origins of tragedy, sacrificed on the altar of the desire—not to fantasize, not to speculate, not to lionize but to know, and to act on that knowledge: Pentheus, Oedipus, Antigone dismembered, blinded, buried alive, mythical victims portending the historical tragedy of Socrates himself, who chose suicide over silence because he would not stop telling people what he considered to be the truth. (And let

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me add, if it needs saying, that sacrificing yourself and sacrificing others are two completely different, and morally opposed, expressions of “moral certainty.”) In a world like Ankersmit’s, where sublime historical experience is strictly private, only the aesthetic can be true: the scene of sacrifice, like the scene of erotic pursuit, has no other lesson to teach us. In a world like Rorty’s, where successive beliefs are not perceived to converge on truth, but one arbitrary and contingent “vocabulary” of description simply overtakes its predecessor, the scene of sacrifice is pointless. Socrates thought he was dying for the truth. Who would choose to die for a vocabulary? Of course, Socrates is famous for his irony, but I doubt that he would have endorsed Rorty’s brand of “ironist theorizing.” For Socrates, irony was a tool for getting at a truth, the existence of which the theorists [Author: Please review the change “the existence of which the theorists”] of vocabulary in his own day—the rhetoricians—had denied. But suppose we leave Socrates out of it, along with Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and the like. Think, instead, of ordinary scholars and educators who face coercion every day, throughout the world, pressures formal and informal, explicit or implied, unless they say what they do not believe is true. I am talking not only about grade school teachers and college professors like those in Iraq, who are nearly every day being threatened, tortured, and killed for doing their jobs, but about all of us, and about the professional demands to compromise with truth that none of us can evade entirely. I am talking about the seductive attractions of “getting to yes,” and the tedious—often self- jeopardizing, if not always life-threatening— duty of weighing it again. The imaginary rotation of Keats’s urn that reveals thanatos as the chiasmatic double of eros also marks a turning point in Keats’s own development as a poet, from sylvan historian of the “thing of beauty” that is “a joy forever,” explorer of secret gardens, dreamer of Adam’s dream, imaginary auditor of a “finer tone,” and speculative whisperer, into the initiate of tragic mysteries, of “soul-making,” of King Lear and Paradise Lost, and the sour disillusionment of Lycius and the terrible necessity of the Titans’ overthrow. Keats’s Grecian urn is ahistorical—“what men or gods are these” could easily be answered with a glance at the caption on the glass museum case—or “cabinet,” as Pascoe might put it—had Keats bothered to provide one. But by allowing his urn to “float free” of history, Keats opens up for us, paradoxically, a reflection on what it means to be anchored, inescapably, to a physical place and to its history. His urn tells us something of the

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perils for truth arising from the merely pleasurable pursuit of beauty, and the “terrible beauty”—to cite Yeats’s “Easter 1916”—that waits upon the tragic sacrifice of self, not for an arbitrary or speculative or contingent point of view or choice of words, but for something at least approaching, or leading future generations closer to, the truth. Keats’s “Ode” begins in the pursuit of “self-sustaining fantasies,” but ends in a public gathering: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

That “little town” has haunted my imagination since I was first introduced to this poem in high school. For many years I could not figure out why. I have come to believe it has something to do with ghost towns, like Pompeii or Herculaneum: the little town “emptied of this folk, this pious morn,” the morning depicted on the urn is like an archaeological ruin surviving into the present, to be “placed” and, thereby, interrogated—“what town?” “who are these?” “to what green altar?”—to be questioned here and now, at the moment the poet encounters it and his reader imagines it, and in this way to be made an object of historical, and not just ironic, speculation. These questions are not like those the poet addresses to the marble men and maidens and the piper on the urn’s opposite side: those serve not to foreclose fantasy, but to incite it. By contrast, we are, in the last three lines of this stanza, observing the little town’s transformation into the depicted site of the urn’s own material origin, its historical omphalos. In a poem about an artifact whose artificer has been sublimated into hazy abstractions—“silence and slow time”—we suddenly stumble upon a habitation, if not a name. Like the scene of erotic pursuit on the urn’s opposite face, the sacrifice will never be consummated. And yet, paradoxically, its consummation has already taken place—not in the forever-young present of that “spirit” where “ditties of no tone” are piped in “unwearied” reiteration, but in what seems to be a real, historical “where” to which none of its original inhabitants can ever return because, unlike men

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and women of marble, they were mortal. The scene of pursuit refers to nothing but itself; the silent town refers to the site, in time and space, of its own creation. Like the “Forlorn” that begins the last stanza of the Nightingale ode, or the “Aye, long ago these lovers fled away into the storm” concluding The Eve of St. Agnes, the desolation of the empty town, its silent streets, bespeak the inrushing of our present upon the past, the moment of our awakening from fantasies about it. The spell of “silence and slow time” that stimulates the poet’s prehensile imagination on one side of the urn is on this side broken, like a dam breached and widening, provoking the restless inquisition of the historiographer. As Emily Sun puts it, “Whereas silence in the former case is associated with eternity and immortality, silence in the latter is linked to the event of mortality,” “an event for which there are no more witnesses” (73). The first scene on the urn thus leads us from unanswerable questions about a material object to delicious speculations about it; the second scene leads us from speculations about an object to the problem of answering the questions that all material objects, and especially the relics of history, pose once they are “placed” before us. Those questions cannot be answered unless we are willing to take the risk of being wrong—of being ridiculed, or denied promotion or that merit raise, or suspended, or dismissed, or jailed, or even killed. Risking an answer that is more than simply a Rortian choice of vocabularies, we lay ourselves down on the altar of error. Did we help the cause of truth? Perhaps only by being wrong, and showing what truth was not. Keats begins in self-sustaining fantasies, but he ends up at the scene of intersubjective sacrifice. For him, as opposed to his unplaceable, other-worldly urn, the truth of beauty is not the same as the terrible beauty of truth, even though they inhabit the same universe. Keats’s “little town” is very far removed in space and time from present-day Kathmandu, but not so far if measured in units of historical imagination. Would the equivalency of beauty and truth enunciated at the end of Keats’s ode have reassured the airline pilots lining the runway in Kathmandu on that April afternoon in 1990, or the peaceful demonstrators facing gunfire and tear-gas before the Royal Palace? “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” was not what they needed to know, at least for those five tense days. Their vision of justice, sustained by its appropriate vocabulary, may have been truly beautiful. Perhaps that beauty even made them glad. But its beautiful truth is what made it seem worth the risk of firings, beatings, imprisonment, even death.

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As for my pot, it still weighs exactly 1,150 grams, or five and threefourths Nepalese paus just as on the day I bought it. Round and of a port in air, it does not give of boy or buyer. It does not give a damn what either of them thinks, or how often it is weighed.

Notes 1. Of course, the “Jana Andolan” or “People’s Movement” of 1990, and the new constitution that resulted from its peaceful demonstrations in April of that year, turned out to be but the first step in a longer process of democratization that, on May 18, 2006, culminated in the complete dissolution of the Nepalese monarchy by an act of Parliament. 2. In 1996, Julie Dock revealed serious problems in the modern editing and republication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first printed in 1892. Gilman’s story had become an important text in feminist studies by the time Dock’s essay appeared. It showed how a masculinist ideology could disguise the suffering of the women it oppressed by medicalizing the evidence of that suffering, treating it as a disease symptom to be explained away “scientifically.” According to Dock, however, “the textual, publication, and reception histories” of the story “reveal the ways [feminist] critics of the 1970s introduced”—she means, fabricated—”and overlooked evidence. The struggle to gain a foothold for women writers in literary studies and the academy often took precedence over textual criticism and archival research into letters and reviews” (Julia Bates Dock, “ ‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship,” PMLA 111: 1 [1996]: 53). 3. “It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s bandages” (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot [London: Faber and Faber (n.d.)], 22). 4. That the Wye was full of industrial pollution in 1798 was a central “fact” of Marjorie Levinson’s groundbreaking New Historicist essay on “Tintern Abbey,” “Insight and Oversight,” published in 1984. Levinson not only misread William Gilpin’s reference to the river’s silt as an “ouzy tide” of pollution from an ironworks nearby, but failed to “place” the ironworks itself at its proper distance from the Abbey, or to note that by July 1798 the works had been shut down for several months due to bankruptcy. For details see Charles Rzepka, “Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, ‘Ouzy’ Tides and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at Tintern, 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 42: 2 (2003). 5. According to Roy Harvey Pearce, the original of Stevens’s jar was the Dominion Wide Mouth Jar, a glass container for preserving fruits and vegetables. See http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevensanecdote.html.

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6. In addition to Argyle, see Trevarthen, Beattie, Gallagher, Kenneally, and Gibson. 7. For the definition and examples of “iconic” gestures and their role in communication, see Geoffrey Beattie, Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language (London: Routledge, 2003), 65–76. 8. “You see but you do not observe,” Holmes chides his sidekick, Dr. Watson, in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” See Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol. I, ed. Loran Estlerman (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 110–111. 9. For an example much closer to Keats’s day than to our own, see Charles Anthon, Classical Dictionary (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 1304a.

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Index

Andersen, Hans Christian, 9 Austen, Jane, 6 Mansfield Park, 71, 73–78, 79–82, 86, 89 and morality, 81–82 Pride and Prejudice, 71

Edinburgh Review, 18–19 Equiano, Olatidah, 22

Banko, Joseph, 18 Bernhardi, August Ferdinand, 4 Bewick, Thomas and John, 59 Blake, William, 4, 11, 187 The Book of Common Prayer, 6, 81, 137–38, 141–93 British trade, 23–24, 26 Byron, George Gordon, 38, 42, 95, 98, 109 Childe Harold, 114, 168 Don Juan, 114 The Giaour, 114 Manfred, 114

Galvani, Luigi, 3 Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 2, 90 Faust, 164 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 82–84

Carroll, Lewis, 9 Carus, Carl Gustav, 3 Catherine the Great, 20 Clairmont, Claire, 38, 42, 95, 97–100 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 11, 184, 187 Christabel, 114 Kubla Khan, 114 Curran, Amelia, 95 “Portrait of Percy Shelley,” 98–100 Dante Alighieri, 4 Darwin, Charles, 9 Diderot, Denis, 1

Foucault, Michel, 9 Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 9

Hazlitt, William, 109 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 3 Heidegger, Martin, 184 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1 Hesse, Hermann Siddhartha, 172–73 Humboldt, Alexander, 19 Hunt, Leigh, 13, 109, 117 James, Henry, 6 The Aspern Papers, 95–97, 101–5 Kant, Immanuel, 1 Keats, John, 6–7, 10, 18, 191 Endymion, 127 “Eve of St. Agnes,” 13 Hyperion, 13, 119 Odes (1819), 118–34 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 13, 132–33, 181, 194–98 “Ode to Autumn,” 13

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Index

Keats, John—Continued “Ode to Psyche,” 13 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 130–2 visual style, 121–25 Keble, John, 7 The Christian Year, 137–53 Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich, 3 Kierkegaard, Soren, 9 Kotzebue, August Die Spanier, 20 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 3 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1 The Liberal, 6, 109, 110 Marx, Karl, 9 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 2 Mill, John Stuart, 9 Milton, John, 13 Miranda, Francisco, 5, 17–32 Occasional Correspondence, 29–30 Napoleon Bonaparte, 18 Norton, Caroline Sheridan The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody of Infants Considered, 41 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 3, 7 Hymnen an die Nacht, 159, 165–69 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 164 Pitt, William, 5, 17–18, 21–32 Plato Symposium, 114 Pound, Ezra, 178 Pushkin, Alexander, 95 Reil, Johann Christian, 3 Richardson, Samuel, 59 Robertson, William History of America, 19 Romanticism and childhood, 37

and discourse, 1–2, 179–83, 185–93 and fable, 60–65 and the fragment, 53 and indeterminacy, 55–58 and individualism, 72–73, 82–88, 138–42, 146–48 and landscape, 54–55, 59 and language, 4–5 and love, 171–72 and nature, 139–45 and object theory, 14–16 and Orientalism, 159–61, 165–73 and Protestantism, 76–80, 89–91, 145–53 and “thing” theory, 9–12 and the visual arts, 117–21 Schelling, Friedrich, 4, 161–62, 164 Schiller, Friedrich, 162–64 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 3 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1, 3, 165, 166 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 1, 84–86 Shakespeare, William, 13 Shelley, Harriet, 38, 39, 42–43 Shelley, Mary (Godwin), 38, 40, 98, 109, 111–12 Shelley, Percy, 3, 5, 6, 11, 37, 95, 187 An Address to the Irish People, 38 Alastor, 7, 159, 169 child custody trial, 38–44, 48–49 death and cremation, 109–12 Laon and Cythna, 45–46 Posthumous Poems, 111–15 Prometheus Unbound, 4 Rosalind and Helen, 46–47 “To Ianthe,” 45 “To William,” 44–45 slavery, 21–22, 24–26 Smith, Adam The Wealth of Nations, 17

Index Smith, Charlotte, 6, 51 Beachy Head, Fables, and Other Poems, 52, 58–67 Socrates, 37 Southey Robert, 18 Madoc, 20 Spenser, Edmund, 13 Stevens, Wallace, 179, 182 Tieck, Ludwig, 1 Trelawny, Edward, 111 Trimmer, Sarah The Teacher’s Assistant: Consisting of Lectures in the Catechetical Form, 44 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 3

Westbrook, Eliza, 39 White, Jose Blanco, 18 Whitman, Walt, 95 Wilberforce, William A Practical View of Christianity, 79 Williams, Helen Maria, 18 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 95 Wordsworth, William, 5, 9–13, 178, 184, 187, 193 “The Excursion,” 114 “Expostulation and Reply,” 9 the Lucy poems, 47–48 Lyrical Ballads, 114 “Peter Bell,” 114 The Prelude, 14 “Tintern Abbey,” 9

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