eJournals

CONTENTS Foreword..................................................................................................... IX I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES Introduction................................................................................................ XI Contributors............................................................................................ XXV I. Pilgrims, Pamphlets, Pickled Herrings: Mobility in the Early Modern Period I NGO B ERENSMEYER From Pilgrimage to Picaresque: Dimensions of Mobility in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature......................... 3 H ERBERT G RABES Support from Abroad: Early Modern English Import of Oppositional Pamphlets ....................................................................... 23 A NDREW H ADFIELD Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe................................................ 39 T OBIAS D ÖRING Magic and Mobility: Theatrical Travels in Marlowe and Shakespeare ................................................................... 57 H ASSAN M ELEHY The Mobility of Constancy: Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lipsius.................................................................................................. 73 C HRISTOPH E HLAND The Stage Is Not Enough: Early Modern Drama and the Representation of Movement............................................................. 95 VI T ILL K INZEL Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea: Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Daniel Defoe’s The King of Pirates and Mary Lacy’s The Female Shipwright........................................................ 111 II. Mob and Mobility: Migrant Fictions in the 18 th Century S TEPHAN K OHL Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers and the Idea of the Nation...................................................................... 133 B IRGIT N EUMANN ‘Travels for the Heart’: Practices of Mobility, Concepts of Movement and Constructions of Individuality in Sentimental Travelogues.................................................................... 155 J ULIA S TRAUB Mobility and the Canon: Discussing Literary Value in Early American Writing..................................................................... 177 O LIVER S CHEIDING Migrant Fictions: The Early Story in North American Magazines............................................................... 197 P ASCAL F ISCHER The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’......................................................... 219 S TEFAN H. U HLIG The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric.............................................................. 237 III. Social and Individual Mobility: Travels in the 19 th Century M ARSHALL B ROWN Austen’s Immobility................................................................................ 267 P HILIPP E RCHINGER Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing in Victorian Writing................................................................................. 285 VII W ENDY P ARKINS Social Mobility and Female Agency: The Case of Jane Morris........................................................................... 313 D ENNIS B ERTHOLD Melville’s Carpetbag: Nautical Transformations of the Authorial Self................................................................................. 327 Foreword Most of the contributions to this volume of REAL were presented at the international conference “Mobility in English and American Literature and Culture, 1500-1900,” held at Justus Liebig University Giessen (Rauischholzhausen Castle) from November 30 to December 3, 2011. We would like to express our gratitude to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Giessen University Association and the University of Paderborn, whose generous support made it possible to bring together scholars from various countries for this conference. We gratefully acknowledge the commitment and support of Catharina Drott, Gero Guttzeit, Dieter Laufer, Stefanie Rück and Martin Spies, as well as the friendly staff at Rauischholzhausen Castle, for making the conference a success. Special thanks go to Stefanie Rück for her tireless editorial work on this volume. Ingo Berensmeyer Christoph Ehland Herbert Grabes I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES Introduction Over the last few years, mobility has become a topic of great interest not only for the social sciences but also for literary and cultural studies. What can reflections on mobility contribute to English and American studies today, and how can concepts of mobility provide us with an opportunity for rethinking the links between reality and representations, between the forms and modes of experience and their cultural stylizations in, for example, literary forms, modes and genres? The present volume is a contribution to this discussion. However, we decided at an early stage to limit our enquiries to a historical range between 1500 and 1900, so as to contain the transhistorical and transcultural challenges of finding an adequate terminology for modes and forms of mobility; but we also wanted to conduct a discussion across traditional period divisions (Renaissance/ early modern, Romantic, Victorian, etc.) and include both English and American cultural contexts in order to present a wider than usual scope of studies in these areas. 1 The burgeoning field of ‘mobility studies’ (a term that is well-established in sociology, but as yet virtually undefined for the study of literature and culture) ranges from global and world-historical processes like migration and the slave trade to more local mobilities of travel, translation and transplantation, and finally to the narrative shaping of individual and communal movements in travel literature, life writing and the bildungsroman, as well as many other genres and forms. Its wide range can be a blessing or a curse: mobility can refer to movements within and between cultures, to exchange processes of texts and other material objects across space and time, to exchanges between texts or changes within texts over time; to more localised and individual cases of individual and social mobility, or the more general dynamics implied in the development of forms, genres, communities or cultures. Finally, and more concretely, it can also turn to the way movement is presented, literally or metaphorically, as a topic in literary texts. 1 The summaries of the chapters by Andrew Hadfield, Tobias Döring, Oliver Scheiding, and Wendy Parkins were previously published as a conference report in the review magazine KULT_online 31 (2012), available at http: / / kult-online.uni-giessen.de/ wps/ pgn/ home/ KULT_online/ tagungsbericht19-2012. The editors wish to thank the authors, Catharina Drott and Gero Guttzeit, and KULT_online for their kind permission to republish this material. I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES XII Different views and versions of ‘mobility’ thus form a stepping-off point for a renewed enquiry into the relationship between experiences of reality and cultural forms. In the history of literary and cultural theory, this interest comes after the heyday of High Theory and may owe something to the increasing dissatisfaction with ever new, often fleeting and transitory theoretical approaches and ‘turns.’ After deconstruction, after even the new historicism and the contextual focus on material culture, scholars are searching for new ways of accessing, unlocking and understanding historical phenomena, including literature, in patterns of mobility. The obvious challenge for literary and cultural scholars is to find adequate correlations between what one might call practices of mobility on the one hand and the cultural as well as literary conceptualizations of these practices on the other hand. These correlations are not likely to be simple, stable and unilinear. Experiences and representations of movement and mobility are predicated on ideological views of what it means to be human; they are involved in political debates about freedom and constraint; and they are implicated in the historical development of the modern world and modern literature. Mobility, therefore, is far more than merely a literary topic. It can be regarded as a key component of culture, as well as an irreducible constituent of textuality. Texts are designed to be mobile and portable; they are intended to ‘move’ their readers and instigate them to action in various ways, 2 Mobility is a many-faceted phenomenon, but it is not yet a clear-cut category for literary analysis. It would be trite and somewhat preposterous to proclaim a ‘mobility turn’ in the wake of the spatial turn or other recent research paradigms. But we do need a few signposts in order to see where mobility studies might be heading in the context of the study of English and American literature and culture, and the contributions gathered in this volume can be read as attempts to establish possible routes to follow in the future. How can we define mobility for literary and cultural studies? Are there common, comparable patterns of mobility that underlie otherwise distinct developments, across traditional boundaries of periodization? and they are frequently characterized by highly mobile exchanges with other texts and other media. The specific idea for this volume was sparked off by the fact that academic work on mobility, especially in the social sciences, still tends to focus almost exclusively on the 20 th and 21 st centuries: on contemporary themes like globalization, migration, postcolonialism, (post)modernism, transnationalism. Relevant as these concerns doubtless are, we think it is necessary to explore mobility also in earlier historical contexts in order to establish, firstly, 2 For an investigation into various modes of readerly activation in the early modern period, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129 (1990): 30-78. Introduction XIII the genealogies of modern notions of mobility in earlier periods, and secondly, the heuristic purchase of ‘mobility studies’ for English and American literature and culture before the 20 th century. * There can be no doubt that mobility has been a crucial element of literary discourse ever since the dawn of writing. The Odyssey naturally comes to mind when thinking of a literature of movement. Odysseus’ long journey home after the fall of Troy not only turns movement into a structural principle of narration but also makes the hero drift through the Mediterranean world. The epic hero is conceptualised as a mobile subject, a ‘man of many turns,’ . 3 Yet whereas the knights and pilgrims of medieval texts experience movement in a largely stable and given space, the ‘modern’ model of correlating space and movement is often regarded as fundamentally different: a question to explore, then, is the alleged epistemic shift between medieval and (early) modern models of space and movement. While movement, on the level of plot, is a constituent of many texts, the idea of mobility for its own sake seems to be connected most closely with modernity. In the early modern period, texts themselves become more mobile, reaching a far wider audience through their mass distribution as objects in print culture; as translations, they become cultural emissaries that connect and inform different societies. Apart from the epoch-making new possibility to quickly disseminate new ideas it proved to be of at least similar importance that since the advent of cheap printing, censorship was no longer able to effectively prevent this. As the wide extent of 16 th and 17 th -century pamphleteering even across national borders shows, the powers that were in place, be they religious or secular, could no longer keep up their monopoly of influence on the minds of the people. It is not too much to say that the spreading of the Reformation in Europe would not have been possible without the new medium of communication, and regarding politics the situation during the English Civil War with its more than 22,000 pamphlets demonstrates how seminal the new mobility The Odyssey and other epic texts formulate the basic narrative principle of the literary representation of motion in space. Similarly, a central figure of medieval literature is the knight-errant, wandering from place to place and finding on his way a world of adventures. For Chaucer’s pilgrims, physical movement is the prerequisite for telling each other stories on the road to Canterbury. Once more movement becomes a structural trajectory of the process of narration. 3 Cf. the opening of the Odyssey: “ , , [...]”; the phrase can be translated as “the man of many turns.” See Norman Austin, “Name Magic in the Odyssey,” Homer’s Odyssey, ed. Lilian E. Doherty (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 91-110, 100. I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES XIV of texts and the ideas they transported was for the development of what became known as ‘public opinion.’ Furthermore, increasing transatlantic exchanges between Britain, Ireland and the US from the later 17 th century onwards are a further proof of the importance of textual mobility as instigated by print culture. As regards connections between the idea of mobility and the development of literary genres, the picaresque novel can serve as an excellent example of the intersection between literary and cultural forms of mobility in the early modern period: the pícaro is a genuinely mobile individual and a trailblazer for new ways of writing the world as a world in motion. With the picaresque novel, mobility in literature becomes multidimensional: it allows not only for social ascent but functions as a catalyst of identity. With the movement from place to place and from environment to environment, the subject becomes a structured blank that can assume a potentially endless and ever-changing array of masks and roles. Individual perspective and perception, what Wolfgang Iser calls the ‘wandering viewpoint,’ become crucial modalities of experiencing reality as an ‘open context.’ 4 As the picaresque novel illustrates, literature registers cultural shifts and transitions that have a more than merely literary significance. The experience of a mobilized and decentred universe calls for new strategies of perceiving and stabilizing the world. Early modern philosophical thought therefore seeks to re-situate the centre within the individual. Just as the picaresque genre elevates its hero to the creator of his own worldview, René Descartes situates the new centre in the thinking self. Seen in this light, the Cartesian revolution can be read as one of perspective. The close connection between mobility, perspective and in consequence identity appears to be an elementary signature of modernity. Paul Virilio, Hartmut Rosa, Anthony Giddens and other cultural theorists and sociologists have observed that with the acceleration of movement the individual experiences a fundamental displacement or dislodging of his or her self. This dislodging effect, however, privileges the perspective and dominance of the mobile vision over the static environment. 5 Even though forms of movement across distances of space and time are so obviously fundamental for (almost) any culture, its systematic and historical 4 See Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, eds. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 29-48; Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980). On the picaresque, see Christoph Ehland and Robert Fajen, eds., Das Paradigma des Pikaresken / The Paradigm of the Picaresque (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007). 5 Paul Virilio, L’inertie polaire (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990); Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). Introduction XV foundations have rarely been addressed by scholars in our field. Especially in modernity, movement through space and the transport of goods and artefacts across spacial distances has come to characterize patterns of cultural exchange and the conditions of economic and social well-being as well as patterns of oppression and occlusion. Some theorists and historians of ideas have claimed that the expansion of the spatial horizon in early modernity, through global exploration and the encounters with a so-called ‘New World,’ led to an increasing reflection on European self-perceptions and indeed to a completely new concept of reality, understood as an open and expanding context. 6 In early modern Europe, increasing mobility led to an understanding of culture as based on comparisons with other cultures and societies, past and present, a comparative perspective of mutual otherness that stimulated the querelle des anciens et des modernes as well as Enlightenment modes of international intellectual exchange. 7 In American studies, the expanding context calls to mind the notion of the frontier, famously expounded by Frederick Jackson Turner in Chicago in 1893. 8 Aided by new technologies, the forces of change in modernity begin to speed up through industrialization, changing the way we perceive our ecosystem (the sense of a landscape changes when viewed through the window of a moving train, becoming in effect cinematic 9 Cultural history can hardly be written without a dynamic notion of mobility. Processes of modernization and patterns of mobility are connected, but the precise ways of connection still need to be explored. Especially in English and American studies, such processes are of central concern for coming to terms with the global spread of English as a lingua franca and the history of ) - and even affecting the correlation between the everyday world and the spheres of religion, ethics, and the hereafter, as can be seen in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s scathing revision of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, “The Celestial Railroad.” Speed of motion becomes an emblem of modernity. On the level of plot, modern narrative literature, at least since the 18 th century, is full of vehicular transportation, its glories and its breakdowns, from coaches (which crash splendidly in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker and in Austen’s Sanditon) to trains (Victorian sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret or East Lynne are unthinkable without railways) and boats (Three Men in a Boat, Heart of Darkness). 6 See Blumenberg (as in fn. 3). 7 Peter Burke, “Locating Knowledge: Centres and Peripheries,” A Social History of Knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 52-80; Niklas Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 31-54. 8 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921). 9 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: U of California P, 1986). I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES XVI Britain (and later the US) as dominant world powers. And, last but not least, to discuss mobility also means to discuss the practices of resisting mobility (as an emblem of modernization) that can be observed throughout English and American history: from the anti-Jacobin novel of the 1790s, for instance, to the Confederates’ stance against industrialization and to the Southern Agrarians among the early 20 th -century American New Critics. * Beginning with a reminder of the great variety of forms of mobility, Ingo Berensmeyer in his article “From Pilgrimage to Picaresque. Dimensions of Mobility in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature” first presents a heuristic model of ‘mobility studies’ that makes use of recent discussions of cultural ecology but also includes various kinds of ‘circulating entities’ (Bruno Latour), - combining the traditional emphasis on temporality with the more recent one on spatial models. Then focusing on the question how texts and genres are affected by mobility, he demonstrates the changes from Chaucer’s presentation of the medieval pilgrimage to the 17 th -century picaresque narrative by a closer inspection of urban loneliness as it shows in Thomas Hoccleve’s aimless nocturnal wanderings through Westminster and the way in which Isabella Whitney in her Sweet Nosgay presents the City of London from the moral perspective of a conduct book as a space for female activity, to Henry Peacham Jr.’s Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum with its picaresque presentation of the self-assertive mobile individual. Regarding textual and generic mobility, Berensmeyer draws further attention to the role of the 16 th and 17 th -century verse miscellany as a genre of extremely high versatility in form and content. And even the few examples from that early period lead him to the conclusion that “[m]obility itself is a travelling concept, difficult - perhaps impossible - to encompass in a single disciplinary concept or style of thought.” As an aspect of “the dissemination of written texts far beyond their place of origin,” mobility features in Herbert Grabes’ “Support from Abroad: Early Modern English Import of Oppositional Pamphlets.” Grabes investigates early modern English print culture in its connections to continental printers and the use of fictitious places of origin to circumvent censorship in England, especially with regard to religious pamphleteering in the 16 th century. This period, characterised as it is by successive bouts of reformation and recatholicisation, yields ample evidence of lively exchanges of ideas and printed pamphlets across Europe. The loss of the state “monopoly of influence on public opinion” as a consequence of print culture, Grabes argues, brought about a significant increase in the mobility of ideas and opinions and thus a push towards democratisation. Even if it is chaotic and confusing, this emerging public sphere of competing opinions is nevertheless preferable to Introduction XVII “a situation in which mobility in terms of a circulation of ideas and opinions or even physical mobility is tightly controlled.” Andrew Hadfield’s “Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe” focuses on mobility and/ as travel. As the title of one of Nashe’s novels, The Unfortunate Traveller, implies, travel is always associated with hardship or misery in Nashe’s works. Hadfield investigates a debate between Nashe and his arch enemy Gabriel Harvey on the value of Richard Hakluyt’s popular Principal Navigations, in which Nashe strongly opposed Hakluyt’s promotional and self-fashioning collection; Harvey countered by speaking of Nashe’s travel literature as “phantasticall bibble-bables.” Hadfield reads Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe, a reaction to Harvey’s taunts, as a successful parody of early modern English overseas mobility, in which Nashe satirically criticized the patriotic self-fashioning and promotion of English explorations. The central personification of a red herring going on a journey not only transforms the herring into an object representative for the importance of sustenance on foreign travels, but it also turns it into a mobile and expedient object which indirectly draws the attention towards socio-economic conditions at home, thus ultimately criticizing the exploitative aspects of English mobility in the early modern period. In “Magic and Mobility: Theatrical Travels in Marlowe and Shakespeare,” Tobias Döring examines English Renaissance theatre not only as a site of social mobility and cultural exchange but also as a medium for the staging of contingency, a feature of mobility that Stephen Greenblatt views as its key characteristic. Mainly referring to Othello and Doctor Faustus, Döring focuses on the metatheatrical foregrounding of the performative power of words, a power predicated on immobilizing the play’s spectators. At the same time, the theatre of Marlowe and Shakespeare contrasts with the earlier medieval theatrical tradition where the journeys from heaven to hell are conceived in terms of physical movement; in Renaissance theatre, the actors move within the small space of the stage and yet this stage is everything by way of the rhetorical and dramatic, indeed magical, power of words. The uses of theatrical mobility lie in its power to redefine the local as a space where the spectators can meet again despite the ‘hurly-burly’ of contingency. Mobility and contingency as a threat to constancy also feature in Hassan Melehy’s essay “The Mobility of Constancy: Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lipsius.” Melehy explores Justus Lipsius’ notion of constancy (De constantia, 1583) as a personal quality integral to the stability of a republic, and the ways that Michel de Montaigne engages and slyly departs from this view in the Essais (1580, 1588, 1595). Of particular interest to Montaigne is the social mask, which Lipsius rejects as a threat to constancy but which Montaigne characterizes as inevitable in matters of state. Melehy traces a comparable treatment of Lipsius in Shakespeare: in a drawn-out and specific set of allu- I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES XVIII sions in Julius Caesar to the 1594 English translation of Lipsius’ treatise, Shakespeare raises the question of whether constancy can be a function of anything but theatrical dissimulation. The bedrock of the state, the sovereign himself, turns out to be the effect of a set of social masks. In his essay “The Stage Is Not Enough: Early Modern Drama and the Representation of Movement,” Christoph Ehland investigates the relationship between the stage and the representation of movement as a distinct generic problem and as a challenge to theatrical performance. In his reading of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West and John Day’s The Travails of the Three English Brothers, Ehland examines the theatrical consequences of two significant and related developments in the early modern period: the expansion of the geographical horizon and the experience of mobility. The stage, in this argument, “makes the widening horizon of English society part of its popular collective consciousness.” As ‘dis-location’ (Anthony Giddens) becomes a key experience of modernity, mobility causes fissures in the symbolic vocabulary of the period (which traditionally favoured stasis over movement), allowing us to gauge its power for change in collective identity constructions. In the 17 th and 18 th centuries, mobility develops into a crucial element of autobiographical texts, as Till Kinzel argues in his contribution “Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea: Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Daniel Defoe’s The King of Pirates and Mary Lacy’s The Female Shipwright.” The diaries of Samuel Pepys can be regarded as a paradigmatically mobile text in so far as the constant movements of Pepys about town provide the counterpoints to his acts of writing at home. Pepys, moving through the city of London in the interests of politics, business, or pleasure presents to the reader the image of the bustling city itself, constantly evokes an image of mobility. This is extended to his naval interests and the few occasions where Pepys actually travelled on board ship. His naval experience, however, links his life and his life-writing to those who have written autobiographically about the seafaring element on British life. In order to highlight gender-related issues in connection with mobility, Kinzel compares and constrasts Pepys’s autobiographical mobility with naval writing by Defoe and Mary Lacy, who for many years served in the Royal Navy as a woman, presenting a highly revealing account of the possibilites and constraints of female mobility in early modern seafaring Britain. Stephan Kohl explores the relationship between “Spatial Practices of 18 th - Century Domestic Travellers and the Idea of the Nation.” Using Yi-Fu Tuan’s typology of vertical and horizontal space, he examines the interconnection between the new technologies available for communication and the ways people have conceptualized space during the transport revolution in 18 th century Britain by comparing domestic ‘Tours’ composed in the first quarter Introduction XIX of the century with ‘Tours’ written in the 1770s. It becomes clear that the considerable changes in the travellers’ perception of their country from the earlier to the later 18 th century depended to a great extent on the massive mid-century improvement of the road system. Kohl demonstrates in detail how the ensuing shift of focus from ‘vertical space’ in terms of the hierarchy of traditional authorities to ‘horizontal space’ as a ‘network of relations’ influenced the travellers’ sense and concept of the nation. Whereas in the travelogues from the earlier 18 th century the consequences of mobility are either totally negated, an obstacle to the sense of a nation, or at best resolved in a compromise between vertical and horizontal space, from the 1780s onwards easier horizontal mobility is already so much taken for granted that much attention can be given to the aesthetic dimension and wider emotional effect of whatever is observed, and that the new focus on improvement came to modernize the concept of the British nation. 18 th -century travel writing is also the focus of Birgit Neumann’s contribution “‘Travels for the Heart’: Practices of Mobility, Concepts of Movement and Constructions of Individuality in Sentimental Travelogues.” She explores the fashion for ‘sentimental’ travel-writing as regards the connections between practices of mobility and comparative observations of foreign and domestic manners. Neumann reads practices of mobility as a catalyst for the indulgence of sentimental feeling and for the exploration of the everchanging inner states of the observing subject. While many previous travellers knew from extensive preparatory reading what they would find on the beaten tracks of Europe, the sentimental traveler was interested in first-hand experience of the foreign, particularly foreigners’ fortunes and suffering, in digressions and in various forms of transgression. Practices of mobility and the promotion of sensibility were therefore intricately bound up with the assertion of individuality and, more specifically, with constructions of middle-class masculinity. In turn, travelling abroad opened up a space onto which concepts of sensibility and their manifold intersections with the domestically powerful categories of class and gender could be mapped. In the 18 th century, notions of literary value - i.e. the question of what constitutes ‘good’ literature - were developed on both sides of the Atlantic. In “Mobility and the Canon: Discussing Literary Value in Early American Writing,” Julia Straub looks at the discursive dimensions of what today would be called ‘canon debates’ in the context of colonial, and later US- American, writing and cultural discussions. She examines two important means of selection and preservation, the literary magazine and the poetry anthology. Analyzing their development in the later 18 th and early 19 th centuries, Straub shows how literary value was defined discursively in North America against the backdrop of British and European traditions. I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES XX Transnational and transatlantic perspectives are also at the centre of Oliver Scheiding’s “Migrant Fictions: The Early Story in North American Magazines.” Scheiding criticizes the restriction of the concept of literary globalization to the novel and outlines how the notions of textual travel and transformation can change our predominantly national understanding of the American short story. He shows how the first so-called American short stories emerge from complex transcultural exchanges and the material constraints of magazine publishing in 18 th -century America, using the example of “The Child of Snow.” This story is usually identified as an ‘authentic’ American tale, yet Scheiding traces its textual mobility through an 18 th century French predecessor back to an 11 th -century collection in which the equivalent story is set in Southern Germany. The fact that it came to be perceived as American is - among other reasons - the result of the work not of an author, but an editor, Isaiah Thomas, who omitted the source reference in the story’s publication in the Massachusetts Magazine. The transnational journey of “The Child of Snow” illustrates the necessity to transnationalize the emergence of the short story prior to Washington Irving. Pascal Fischer’s essay “The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’” shows that a denigration of movement was an important element in the formation of conservatism in England during the French Revolution and that this strongly affected the structure of conservative narrative literature. Embracing stability as a central constituent of their identity, conservative authors regularly present mobility as a serious threat to everything the English nation treasures. The study bases its analyses on numerous political tracts, pamphlets, and novels of the 1790s and early 1800s. The theoretical framework is cognitive metaphor theory, which has stressed the importance of metaphorical conceptualizations for political ideologies. Fischer demonstrates that the central contrast between constancy and movement not only affects individual images of English conservatism (like the oak) but also the narrative form of early conservative novels. Mobility in the form of textual and cultural dissemination is also the focus of Stefan H. Uhlig’s “The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric,” in which he traces the gradual demise of rhetoric as a discipline and practice in Enlightenment Europe due to “the emergence of empirical alternatives to text-based intellectual routines.” With respect to the Scottish ‘new rhetoric’ of Adam Smith and Hugh Blair, he examines the academic significance of rhetoric in conjunction with belles lettres before the institutionalization of the history and theory of literature in university departments. In its Scottish context of origin, the new rhetoric also served to provide students at the Scottish universities with opportunities of (socio-)linguistic, cultural and economic mobility. Yet whereas curricular reforms in 19 th -century Scotland dethroned Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres from its key position in the teaching of rhetoric and Introduction XXI style, it remained “the single most consistently used arts textbook” in the US until the Civil War. Its staying power in this context is, however, not blessed with genuine intellectual influence, since it failed to inspire “any concrete adaptation or development in the academy.” Uhlig concludes that this is largely due to the increasing specialization and compartmentalization of disciplines in modernity, in which Blair’s model of discursive sociability is no longer applicable. He thus shows how, in this example, mobility and stasis intersect. Mobility and stasis are also thought in relation to each other in Marshall Brown’s essay on “Austen’s Immobility.” Brown considers the costs attendant on a world that tries to live secured from migration. Jane Austen’s plots stay closely confined to villages, vacation settings, and occasional immersions in the turbulence of London or Portsmouth. They seem to reject the larger world in favour of a stabilizing domesticity. But what would it mean to consider the world of migration the human norm then, as it has been later, earlier, and elsewhere? Large-scale migrations and encounters occupy the peripheries of Jane Austen’s world, including imperial exploitation, slavery, European war, and, within the British Isles, displaced groups including settlers to and from Ireland and gypsies, enclosure and urban migration. What if Austen imagined domesticity as a deprivation of the living energies that, as a spinster, she had little opportunity to enjoy? Philipp Erchinger looks at Victorian practices of writing and observing the world; a world in formation that cannot be reduced to an ideal pattern outside of the spatio-temporal processes through which this pattern takes shape. His essay “Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing in Victorian Writing” argues that this ontology of movement, as it was most forcefully promoted by evolutionary theory, became increasingly tied up with a concomitant epistemology, according to which structures of knowledge originate in processes of ‘varying the circumstances’ (Mill), engendering traces of representation that can be read back into the conditions from within which they have been released, potentially modifying these conditions. In this way, forms of knowledge were seen to emerge from an experimental dialogue between ‘hand and head’ (Bernard), medium and meaning, process and pattern, both evolving together. Structures of all kinds could therefore, on this account, not be separated from the generative activities through which they are issued forth, modified, abandoned and held in place. Through readings of different authors ranging from G.H. Lewes to Wilkie Collins, Erchinger demonstrates how this argument for a movement-based epistemology is borne out by various kinds of Victorian writing. In “Social Mobility and Female Agency: The Case of Jane Morris,” Wendy Parkins outlines the relationship between literature and social mobility in the 19 th century through the example of the Victorian model Jane Morris. As an I NGO B ERENSMEYER , C HRISTOPH E HLAND , H ERBERT G RABES XXII icon of Pre-Raphaelite art, Morris became an important figure in the aesthetic movement, and her embodiment of high art widely circulated in Victorian culture. As the ‘face of aestheticism,’ Parkins argues that Morris provides an example of the mobility of an image associated with the expansion of print culture, the development of new forms of visual technology and the rise of celebrities in the early Victorian period. Parkins juxtaposes the historical figure of Jane Morris with a literary depiction of her in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown, in which a Morris-like character is confronted with aestheticism, positivism and socialism. The novel reflects upon Morris’s transformation from working-class girl to intellectual woman, not only through marrying up, but also through the self-acquisition of cultural capital, such as music or languages, and, most importantly, reading. Liberation through literacy, Parkins argues, was associated with the attainment of an internal and emotional emancipation, which made it an important premise for successful social mobility. In the essay that concludes this volume, “Melville’s Carpetbag: Nautical Transformations of the Authorial Self,” Dennis Berthold gives a detailed demonstration of the explanatory and interpretive power of the concept of mobility regarding the access to the personality, the authorial function, and the work of a writer as individualistic as Herman Melville. Berthold introduces Melville as “one of the most physically mobile” authors up to his time; he then goes on to examine Melville’s ‘generic mobility’ in the turn from narrative prose to verse, as Melville actually devoted a much longer period of his life to poetry than to fiction. Most readers will probably not be acquainted with the epic poem Clarel that Berthold analyzes in the final section of his essay: a poem that documents Melville’s historical mobility in terms of a turn to classical antiquity, and the following sections on “Theological Mobility: Oceanic Doubt” and “Psychological Mobility: The Authorial Self” show how fruitful a metaphorical use of the signifier ‘mobility’ can be for an adequate rendering of inner changes. Mobility has consequences for an author’s selfconception, and the case of Melville shows both its rewards and its penalties. The contributions to this volume do not presume to tell a coherent story about mobility as a key concept in literary and cultural history, but they explore a range of aspects in which the manifold forces of mobility are implicated in social, cultural, artistic and literary contexts. They provide case studies for the connection between processes of modernization and patterns of mobility, and they discuss the ways in which concepts of mobility can be made fruitful for the field of English and American literary and cultural studies. The fact that they do not converge into a linear narrative or attempt to establish a research paradigm is not to be regretted; indeed, one of the best things to be said about mobility studies is that it is itself mobile. Introduction XXIII Works Cited Austin, Norman. “Name Magic in the Odyssey.” Homer’s Odyssey. Ed. Lilian E. Doherty. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 91-110. Blumenberg, Hans. “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel.” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. Eds. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. 29-48. Burke, Peter. “Locating Knowledge: Centres and Peripheries.” A Social History of Knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. 52-80. Ehland, Christoph, and Robert Fajen, eds. Das Paradigma des Pikaresken / The Paradigm of the Picaresque. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton. “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy.” Past & Present 129 (1990): 30-78. Luhmann, Niklas. “Kultur als historischer Begriff.” Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft. Vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. 31-54. Rosa, Hartmut. Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1986. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1921. Virilio, Paul. L’inertie polaire. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990. Contributors B ERENSMEYER , I NGO . Institut für Anglistik. Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10 B, 35394 Gießen, Germany. B ERTHOLD , D ENNIS . Department of English. Texas A&M University. MS 4227 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843, United States. B ROWN , M ARSHALL . Department of Comparative Literature. University of Washington, Seattle. Padelford Hall B531, Seattle, WA 98195, United States. D ÖRING , T OBIAS . Institut für Englische Philologie. Ludwig-Maximilian- Universität München. Schellingstraße 3 RG, 80799 München, Germany. E HLAND , C HRISTOPH . Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Universität Paderborn. Technologiepark 21, 33100 Paderborn, Germany. E RCHINGER , P HILIPP . Department of English. University of Exeter. Queen‘s Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, United Kingdom. F ISCHER , P ASCAL . Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany. G RABES , H ERBERT . Institut für Anglistik. Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10 B, 35394 Gießen, Germany. H ADFIELD , A NDREW . Centre for Early Modern Studies. University of Sussex. Sussex House, Brighton, BN1 9RH, United Kingdom. K INZEL , T ILL . Englisches Seminar Abteilung Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften. Technische Universität Braunschweig. Bienroder Weg 80, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany. K OHL , S TEPHAN . Englische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft. Julius- Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany. M ELEHY , H ASSAN . Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC 27599, United States. N EUMANN , B IRGIT . Philologische Fakultät, Universität Passau. Innstraße 25, 94032 Passau, Germany. P ARKINS , W ENDY . Department of English, University of Otago. Albany Street, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. C ONTRIBUTORS XXVI S CHEIDING , O LIVER . American Studies. Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Jakob-Welder-Weg 18, 55099 Mainz, Germany. S TRAUB , J ULIA . North American Literature. Universität Bern. Länggassstrasse 49, 3000 Bern 9, Switzerland. U HLIG , S TEFAN H. Faculty of English. University of Cambridge. 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP, United Kingdom. I. Pilgrims, Pamphlets, Pickled Herrings: Mobility in the Early Modern Period I NGO B ERENSMEYER From Pilgrimage to Picaresque: Dimensions of Mobility in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature Mobility comes in many forms; there is no unified theory to encompass its heterogeneous multiplicity and varying cultural schemata. For example, in medieval literature, physical mobility can be beset with anxieties and a nostalgia for the home that has been lost, as in the Old English elegies of “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”, but it can also serve as a formula for adventure and heroic exploits, including self-exploration, for a hero like Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Furthermore, it can be a precondition for the telling of stories, as in the case of Chaucer’s pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Movement through space can be many things: a religious exercise, a self-willed task, or a necessity imposed on the moving subject by society or destiny, as in literatures of exile or “literatures without a fixed abode.” 1 Forms and performances of mobility in the early modern period involve complex negotiations between individual experiences and social expectations, between selfhood and status, individuality and community. These negotiations are mediated - and thus further ‘socialised’ - in texts. From the later Middle Ages onwards, there is a shift from pilgrimage as a mode of communal experience to the loneliness of the urban individual, and finally to the (early) modern mode of the picaresque as a (temporary) solution to the dilemmas of individual mobility. The case studies chosen for this essay, ranging from Thomas Hoccleve to Isabella Whitney and William Shakespeare, all address individual mobility, as well as the mobile relationship between individuals and the community; they all refer the individual (back) to an experiential and spiritual model of pilgrimage, which increasingly appears like a lost ideal. Finally, these texts also invite modern readers to question tradi- Movement can be desirable as a spiritual experience, as in the pilgrimage; it can be a performance intended to entertain the public and to advertise the performer’s skills, as in William Kempe’s Nine Days Wonder, the account of his morris dance from London to Norwich in 1600; or it can include the illicit wanderings of the vagrant, generally criminalised and penalised in the early modern world. 1 Ottmar Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben. Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz (ÜberLebenswissen II) (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005) 16 (English in the original). I NGO B ERENSMEYER 4 tional assumptions on the ways in which the meaning of texts is affected by textual mobility in manuscript and print. Before embarking on this journey, however, I would like to suggest a heuristic model, based on a variant of cultural ecology, with which to describe and to systematise key dimensions of mobility as a concept for literary studies. I intend to demonstrate the potential range of mobility studies without proposing a coherent, all-encompassing theory of mobility. That said, I do wish to provide some indications of ways in which movement and mobility might be conceived in a non-reductionist manner. 1. Cultural Ecology and Mobility Studies Mobility is predicated on notions of movement and motion, which come in a staggering number of possibilities: actual or imagined, real or metaphorical, circular or linear, free or constrained, slow or speedy, absolute or relative. Since movement and motion are physical phenomena, they cannot themselves provide the ground on which they are to be described. Their cultural meanings are often metaphorical and context-dependent. In order to do justice to the complexity of this topic, the following proposal for ‘mobility studies’ is based on recent developments in cultural ecology - itself a highly mobile and as yet not fully formed interdisciplinary approach to understanding cultural processes. Current varieties of cultural ecology, especially in France and Germany, combine a wide range of theories, models and methods from various disciplines to create a highly fertile field of research. This understanding of the term ‘ecology’ transcends a narrow focus on the environment, as is frequently found in ecocriticism. The history of ecological thinking in the humanities, however, is in fact much older than many ecocritics care to acknowledge. When, in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars as different as Ernst Kantorowicz, Kenneth Burke and T.S. Eliot began to experiment with ecological thinking, they could not foresee its subsequent impact. Their own visions of an ecology of history, literature and culture are now, for the most part, forgotten; Burke’s “little fellow named ecology,” Eliot’s “ecology of cultures,” and Kantorowicz’s “ecology of history” are phantoms of the historical archive of literary and cultural studies. 2 2 See Marika A. Seigel, “‘One Little Fellow Named Ecology’: Ecological Rhetoric in Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History.” Rhetoric Review 23.4 (2004): 388-404. I wish to thank Gero Guttzeit for drawing my attention to this article. For Eliot’s coinage “ecology of cultures,” see T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1963 (1948)), 58; for Ernst Kantorowicz’s “ecology of history,” see Ulrich Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben (Munich: Beck, 2009), 340-41. In its most general sense, ecology can refer to a network of elements and processes, more or less sys- From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 5 tematically linked. Cultural ecology thus emphasises, in one current definition, the “highly complex multiplicity of mutually supplementing and interlaced systems of mental worlds.” 3 To this I would add those dimensions of culture that are based on concrete and material, non-mental interconnections between objects, actors, and their environments in cultural processes, for instance in the way that Bruno Latour and other actor-network theorists have redescribed agency in order to include material objects as “mediators” in a “parliament of things” that make a difference along chains of “circulating references.” 4 Because of its flexibility and high degree of generalisation, such a way of thinking offers a useful multi-perspectival approach to mobility in literature and culture, allocating the “circulating entities” 5 to a range of interconnecting levels - or, less hierarchically, dimensions - of mobility: - on the level of human beings as individual and/ or communal and social mobility; e.g. hidden or conspicuous, free or constrained movements, border-crossing, etc. 6 - on the level of texts, artefacts or objects, as follows: 1) on the intratextual level as mouvance 7 2) on the extratextual level of texts and other objects, goods or media: as portability; free or constrained circulation, individual manufacture or mass production; or variation (the changeability of individual texts, especially in manuscripts or early printed texts in different textual states) vs. stability and coherence; 3) on the interand transtextual level as the dynamics of genres, or as the persistence and/ or changeability in themes, characters, or aesthetic effects across time and space; e.g. adaptations, recyclings, etc. 3 Peter Finke, “Kulturökologie,” Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Ansgar and Vera Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 248-79, 261 (my translation, IB). 4 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993) for the notion of a “parliament of things” (142-45); Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999) 24, 53, 72-73 (on “circulating reference”); Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007) 232-46 (on “mediators”). ANT is of course not the only candidate on the list of ‘post-human’ epistemologies/ ontologies; one could also consult such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres; yet another philosophical reference point for Latour is the ‘speculative empiricism’ of A.N. Whitehead (see Pandora, 141, 153, 283; Reassembling, 218, 220). 5 Latour, Reassembling, 237. 6 Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” Greenblatt et al., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 250-253, 250-51. 7 See Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale. Collection Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1972). I NGO B ERENSMEYER 6 - on the level of cultural mobility, in which processes of human and textual mobility are combined in complex networks, contact zones, and in dynamics of persistence and change. The ecological model, based on associations that evolve in space and time, might be able to account for movement and mobility without reducing them to any single level or label, not even to a label as prone to over-generalization as Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘cultural mobility.’ 8 If anything, cultural ecology allows us to see that not everything is cultural, just as not everything is text. But where do we place literature in such a framework? Should there be a privileged role for literary texts in cultural ecology, as Hubert Zapf claims? 9 Rather than according literature a special place in the “universe of discourse,” 10 I would argue for a return to the many-layered and essentially descriptive mode of analysis championed by Gregory Bateson, Clifford Geertz and Kenneth Burke. 11 In the following, I assume that individual textual performances are connected with larger cultural aspects and institutional settings, expectations and norms. They are implicated in processes of mobility on various levels, including genre dynamics and extratextual portability, as indicated above. Such an approach may be useful in understanding the connections, co-evolutive or competitive, between texts and other media, without postulating a goal-oriented process of modernisation. A culturalecological perspective on textuality can be more than a theory of discourse; it can, and should, take into account the material and institutional contexts of communication. 8 Stephen Greenblatt, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” Greenblatt et al., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 250-253. 9 See Hubert Zapf, “Kulturökologie und Literatur. Ein transdisziplinäres Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft,” Kulturökologie und Literatur. Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Hubert Zapf (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 15-44. Zapf’s reason for this claim is that literature is “a form of cultural textuality that has developed in coevolution with, and in a relationship of tension to, the modernization and civilization process” (ibid. 32, my translation, IB). But even if one assumes the development of literature to be related in this way to such a process (or processes - ignoring for the time being the question when this process is supposed to begin), the question remains why this assumption should result in a privileged function to literary texts, compared to other forms of textuality and signification that have co-evolved with modernity in a similar manner. 10 I am borrowing this term from C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (New York: Harcourt, 1923), 102, 111. 11 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966). These are also forerunners of Latour’s insistence on description rather than explanation; see Reassembling 137, 146-7, 150, 154. From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 7 How are texts affected by mobility? On the one hand, a text (in the structuralist understanding as “an invariant system of relations” 12 ) can remain quite stable in different carrier media, across “different spatial, temporal, and medial situations.” 13 In this understanding, the meaning of the “integral signal unit” 14 that is the text is not, or only marginally, affected by portability (understood as the transport of an object that remains, to all intents and purposes, identical). On the other hand, if we understand meaning in a hermeneutic sense, as arising from an interaction between a text and its readers, this will be affected by different scribal or typographical, historical and geographical contexts. A poem by Mallarmé or Pound, encountered in a first edition, beautifully printed on high-quality paper, takes on a different meaning when encountered on a website surrounded by advertisements. 15 As Jorge Luis Borges famously imagines in his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote” (1939), Cervantes’ Don Quijote would not have the same meaning if it had been rewritten by a twentieth-century avantgarde writer, even if the text’s integral signal unit - the sequence of signs on the page - remains identical in this rewriting. This kind of mobility is not a form of transport, but of ‘waywardness,’ a much more radical process in which the object of portability becomes subject to change. 16 But not only do we need to account for the mobility of individual texts, we also have to consider the “migration of forms.” 17 Forms travel: as Franco Moretti has shown for the novel, similar genres have developed all over the world and are now in a continual process of exchange and intermingling. Mobility in this light is not the antipode of stability, but a precondition for the dynamic processes of literary evolution. Genres survive by forming connections, new “attachments” 18 by means of exchanges, adaptations and transfers. Such transfers ensure the survival of literature; canons intermittently stabilise the flow of variation. 19 12 Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Minneapolis: U of Michigan P, 1977), 54. 13 Ingo Berensmeyer, “Cultural Ecology and Chinese Hamlets,” New Literary History 42.3 (2011): 419-38, 420. 14 Lotman, 54. 15 See Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983); Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993). McGann distinguishes between the stable “linguistic code” and the variable “bibliographical codes” of a text. 16 See the contribution by Philip Erchinger in the present volume. 17 A term inspired by the motto for the Documenta 12 art exhibition, Kassel 2007, curated by Roger M. Buergel; see Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 24, 2007, Nr. 93, 48. 18 Yet another Latourian term: see Reassembling 236-37. For a tentative unfolding of its implications for literary and cultural studies, see Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks! ,’“ New Literary History 42.4 (2011): 573-91. 19 See Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007); Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ 61.1 (2000): 207-227. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 8 Such a perspective might enable mobility studies to combine the traditionally dominant emphasis on time or temporality in literary and cultural studies with the more recent modes of conceptualizing patterns of perception and experience in spatial terms, as in transnational and transareal mappings. This understanding of mobility studies will avoid reducing movement to the static spatial image of a map, and take into account the dynamic “vectors” 20 of movement in both space and time. This should ultimately lead to the development of a more “precise terminology of movement, dynamics and mobility.” 21 2. Mobility in Medieval and Early Modern English Texts There is no better way to begin an enquiry into pilgrimage as an individual and communal mode of mobility than Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But its lasting impact as a cultural model of stylizing the relationship between individuals and their community is perhaps best illustrated by Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944). This film, a celebration and questioning of English rural values made while German bombs were falling on British cities, opens with a striking visual commentary on Chaucer’s “General Prologue,” tracing the pilgrims’ route on a medieval-looking map accompanied by a voiceover reading a modernised version of Chaucer’s text, then with actors dressed in medieval garb en route to Canterbury, and culminating in the famous match-cut of a hawk flying in the air which is transformed into an aeroplane: clearly the inspiration for a similar montage to link distinct epochs, bone becoming spaceship, in Stanley Kubrick’s much better known 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). On the road to Canterbury, the medieval pilgrims give way to soldiers in tanks, whose task is to heal the nation’s weakness - in the modern rendition of Chaucer used here, the word “seeke” (sick) is replaced by “weak” - even though it means damaging country roads: the machine in the garden. 22 20 Ette (2005), 19. Here the individual and its irrational quirks, so well known from medieval English literature onwards, are subsumed under the greater good of the community. Indeed, the characters display, as they do in Chaucer, plenty of quirks: Eric Portman plays an English official and gentleman farmer who secretly attacks women by pouring glue on their hair, ostensibly in order to keep the local 21 Ibid., 18. 22 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I (Group A), General Prologue, l. 18, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), 23; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale, Independent Film Distributor, 1944, Granada Ventures, ITV DVD, 2005. Cf. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 1964 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 9 women away from wartime temptations of associating with servicemen. 23 Overtly, the film tries to connect its story of England under siege with the purported social harmony of Chaucer’s time. Yet underneath this surface, country and city uneasily intrude upon each other in this modern version of pastoral; the film’s nostalgic vision is undercut by darker urban elements. But this unease has been a part of pastoral traditions ever since Greek and Roman antiquity, as the pastoral mode plays off the individual and its (actual or potential) isolation and mobility against the community or the nation. In post-Chaucerian England, the attention shifts more and more to city life and the urban malaise of the mobile individual, using the pastoral mode as a form of critique or as a negative foil to offset the depredations of urban, modern living. Far from being a modern genre, however, the enmeshing of self and city that is a hallmark of urban writing can already be found in the Middle Ages. In the following, I am going to focus on some of these older mobility patterns. They are not part of the same genre; their connection (in my ‘ecological’ sense) as urban writings (texts about city life, usually or at least presumably written in cities) is established, firstly, by the way in which they depict the relationship between individual and community; and secondly, by their manner of exploring the pathologies of human life in search of physical and/ or spiritual healing, in analogy or in contrast to the experiential and spiritual model of pilgrimage. On the level of textual rather than individual mobility, the texts under scrutiny here also give rise to reflections on the transmission and mixing of genres and forms in manuscript and print. In keeping with the film’s overall lightness of tone, the culprit goes unpunished at the end, but one may assume that his embarrassment, like that of Sir Gawain, is penance enough. In A Canterbury Tale the destructive engines of modern mobility - which repeatedly intrude on the quiet countryside are harnessed to the purpose of defending English rural values of gentility, constancy, stability and harmony. * In the prologue to Thomas Hoccleve’s (c. 1367-1426) Regiment of Princes (1410- 11), the writer’s persona gives a harrowing account of his nocturnal walks in the city of London, accompanied by his “troubly dremes, drempt al in wakynge” (l. 109). Hoccleve, who worked as a clerk and scribe in the office of the Privy Seal, was responsible for writing documents and correspondence for the king, his council and others. In his poems, he complains about this secretarial work and the little money he receives for it (“sixe marc eerly and 23 The plot of A Canterbury Tale inspired the 1954 Goon Show episode “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-On-Sea.” I NGO B ERENSMEYER 10 no more than that” 24 ). On his nocturnal tour of Westminster, the autobiographical persona meets an elderly beggar; this person forces himself on Hoccleve as a random interlocutor, offering advice and relief for Hoccleve’s “maléncolye” (l. 217), his profound depression and suicidal tendencies (cf. ll. 106-112). The beggar recommends a ‘talking cure’: to complain publicly and without shame about one’s “inward” (l. 254) condition, he argues, helps to maintain a clear head. While the beggar reasons about conventional topics such as faith, age, poverty, fashion and the follies of youth, Hoccleve describes his own work and that of other scribes in the office of the Privy Seal, where he has been working for almost 25 years. He also praises Chaucer, writing that he includes Chaucer’s portrait in his text in order to remind readers of him (one of the mss. indeed has a portrait of Chaucer in the margins). Chaucer had also included himself as a character in the Canterbury Tales, and also in his early text The House of Fame, so Hoccleve picks up this convention and develops it further. He is probably the first English poet to use events from his own life as the immediate subject matter of poetry. For Hoccleve, London is the uncertain stage on which he has to eke out, and to act out, his life. His nocturnal mobility is a precondition for his dialogue with the beggar, and for writing the Regiment of Princes; his movement through the city, however, is not part of a communal pilgrimage but the basis for a very personal complaint. The beggar exhorts Hoccleve to write the text of the Regiment, so that the poet at the end unmasks his prologue as a bid for patronage addressed to the Prince of Wales (later king Henry V): Recordyng in my myndë þe lessoun That he me yaf, I hoom to metë wente; And on þe morowe sette I me adoun, And penne and ynke and parchemyn I hente, And to performe his wil and his entente I took corage, and whiles it was hoot, Vn-to my lord the princë thus I wroot: --- (ll. 2010-16) Hoccleve’s writing is strikingly solitary; in contrast to Chaucer and most other medieval writers, who celebrate the group as a community of shared understandings, Hoccleve’s speaker is obsessively preoccupied “by a sense of 24 Thomas Hoccleve, The Regement of Princes, Hoccleve’s Works vol. 3: The Regement of Princes A.D. 1411-12, from the Harleian MS. 4866, and fourteen of Hoccleve’s minor poems from the Egerton MS. 615, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Early English Text Society, 1897), rpt. in Literature Online (Cambridge: Chadwyck Healy, 1992), l. 974. On the work of Hoccleve, see also Stephan Kohl, “More than Virtues and Vices: Self- Analysis in Hoccleve’s ‘Autobiographies,’“ Fifteenth-Century Studies 14-15 (1988-9): 15- 27; Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Medieval England (Pennsylvania: Penn State UP, 2001); Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001); and Karen Elaine Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (London: Ashgate, 2011). From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 11 personal insecurity and isolation,” almost “a precursor of the narrators of Surrey’s poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets.” 25 In a city of some forty to eighty thousand inhabitants, 26 As a man working for the administration, Hoccleve’s position in life was still a relatively privileged one. This is very different in the case of Isabella Whitney (fl. 1566-1573), the first English woman poet to appear in print in the sixteenth century. Whitney establishes a female perspective on the commercial world of London’s streets and markets, sketching - in her A Sweet Nosgay (1573) - a vision of the city as an assemblage of sites which enable and constrain individual and social mobility. Whereas, for Hoccleve, the street was a meeting place and a stage for the negotiation of individual and communal values, Whitney’s last will and testament to London presents the city’s streets as spaces for commerce and display, for spectacles staged by the powerful and the lowly. As spaces controlled by law, these late 16th-century streets also embody gender-specific limitations on the right to circulate freely within them, thus participating in the differentiation of gendered subjectivities through their exclusion of certain types of bodies and their movements. Thus different types of ‘actors’ (in Bruno Latour’s sense, i.e. including material and textual objects/ media as well as animals and humans) and different forms of agency form mobile and transitory networks and alliances. Another major difference is her text’s circulation in print, rather than manuscript - a form of textual mobility that inaugurates new forms of address and a new literary culture. Hoccleve experiences and depicts perhaps for the first time intense urban loneliness and/ as (aimless) individual movement. Like a late medieval Bartleby, Hoccleve suffers from the physical and mental pains of the dull labour of copying documents. His London is centred on Westminster, where he worked, not ranging farther than the Strand, where he lived. Yet he never describes London as such; it is merely the setting to his personal conflicts - urban, distracting and vaguely threatening. In a different context, Sören Hammerschmidt and I have examined the spaces Whitney constructs in her Sweet Nosgay, the ways in which her textual persona reflects on and relates herself to concepts and spaces of ‘home’ and its exteriors, navigating London’s spheres of cultural and social production and positioning herself in these spaces as a speaker and a subject. 27 25 Roger Ellis, “Introduction,” ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2001), 1-50, 41. As the 26 Figure given for the late 14th century in C. David Benson, “Some Poets’ Tours of Medieval London: Varieties of Literary Urban Experience,” Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007): 1-20, 1. 27 See Sören Hammerschmidt and Ingo Berensmeyer, ”Streetwalkers, Homemakers, and the Female Poet: Negotiating Urban Spaces in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay,” forthcoming in ELR. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 12 public spaces of London are a source of infection for body and mind, this increased mobility of the self is at once a courageous act of defiance (and hence a source of strength) and a health risk. It is a pharmakon: medicine as well as poison. This ambivalence is replicated by the book itself: Whitney advertises her collection of “vertuous Flowers” as protection “[i]n stynking streetes, or lothsome Lanes / which els might mee infect.” 28 In this, the Nosgay seems to fit squarely into the genre of the advice book or conduct manual. But it is also a kind of travel narrative, which takes pleasure in the literary display of urban topographies recollected from memory. Even though she occasionally warns against aimless, uncontrolled wandering, she seems to suggest that the well-advised traveller, male or female, is empowered with moral protection against the infections of London. This, in fact, is her main recommendation for the Nosgay, her book, as a vademecum that will protect the reader: a mobile book for mobile (and sometimes involuntarily mobilised) readers. 29 In her nonlinear and non-narrative record of London, Isabella Whitney provides a topography of spectacle and movement combined with one of associative memory relating to consumer culture and the economic urban space. Whitney’s imaginative and physical movements through London set up the streets of the city as legitimate spaces of female activity in contrast to a “home” to which she never returns throughout the text. Her physical and economic mobility contrasts sharply with traditional assumptions about the degrees of freedom available to women in the early modern period. More importantly in this context, this mobility correlates to the portability and marketability of the printed book of poems as opposed to the manuscript volume circulated among ‘private friends,’ supposedly the standard model of lyric communication in the period, at least for aristocratic poets. 30 28 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, facsimile ed. In “The Floures of Philosophie” (1572), by Hugh Plat; and “A Sweet Nosgay” (1573) and “The Copy of a Letter” (1567), by Isabella Whitney, intro. Richard J. Panofski (facsim. ed. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1982), A4 v , A6 v . The Nosgay questions assumptions about the genre of lyric especially as practised by 29 See Hammerschmidt and Berensmeyer for further details; also cf. Patricia Phillippy, “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and ‘Mother B’ in Isabella Whitney’s ‘A Sweet Nosegay.’” Modern Philology 95, no. 4 (May 1998): 439-62; “Apostrophes to Cities: Urban Rhetoric in Isabella Whitney and Moderata Fonte,” Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1998), 155-75, and “Maidservants of London: Sisterhoods of Kinship and Labor,” Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 21-32; Laura Gowing, “‘The Freedom of the Streets’: Women and Social Space, 1560-1640,” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 130-51. 30 See Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986; Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995). From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 13 women; it does so by including lyric poems in a more general frame, marked by an urban movement that (for women) is tantamount to transgression. The urban text, which employs mobility as its key model of storytelling, or as an entelechy of narrative form, thus also enacts mobility in its physical form when the Nosgay becomes a material book and a part of early modern print culture. This observation leads over to the problems of textual and generic mobility, involving continuity as well as discontinuity, in the early modern period. Whitney’s genre, the verse miscellany, is a highly innovative and mobile form, one which successfully manages the transition from manuscript to print. As a ‘mixed bag,’ the printed verse miscellany allows writers a more free-ranging communication with an increasingly heterogeneous audience. In the same year as A Sweet Nosgay, 1573, George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundry Flowers appears in print, gathering his two plays (the comedy Supposes and the tragedy Jocasta) with numerous poems and the early prose narrative “A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F.J.,” a narrative that includes a number of poems and in which the codes of courtly love - established, first and foremost, in poetry - are given a reality check, not least by the juxtaposition of lyric and narrative. Combining prose and poetry of various kinds, the early modern miscellany commercialises literature for a wider audience, offering advice and entertainment: “for the use of all sorts of persons from the Noblemans Palace to the Artizans Shop,” as the title-page of The Marrow of Complements informs potential buyers. 31 31 Philomusus, The Marrow of Complements. Or, A most Methodicall and accurate forme of Instructions for all Variety of Love-Letters, Amorous Discourses, and Complementall Entertainments. Fitted for the use of all sorts of persons from the Noblemans Palace to the Artizans Shop. With many delightfull Songs, Sonnetts, Odes, Dialogues, &c. Never before published. London 1654. Similar early modern titles in print include The Forrest of Fancy (1579), Nicholas Breton’s Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591) and The Arbor of amorous Deuises (1597); The Spared Hovres of a Sovldier in his Travels, by John Wodroephe (1623), Samuel Pick’s Festum Voluptatis, or The Banquet of Pleasure (1639), Love’s Dialect by Thomas Jordan (1646), The Card of Courtship (1653), John Cotgrave’s Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus (1655), The Academy of Pleasure (1656), Pearls of Eloquence: or, the School of Complements by William Elder (1656), Dudley North’s A Forest Promiscuous of Several Seasons Productions (1659), Merry Drollery (1661), The Art of Courtship (1662), Wits Academy: or, The Muses Delight (1696). In selecting and arranging material of various kinds and sources into a ‘posy’ (or ‘poesie’) or ‘nosegay,’ the miscellany creates an aesthetic unity from diversity; miscellany titles abound with floral and gardening motifs that signal natural beauty (rather than the commercial interests of printers and authors): nosegay, posies, bower, arbour, academy, forest. The transitional movement from verse miscellany manuscripts, which remained popular through the seventeenth I NGO B ERENSMEYER 14 century, to printed anthologies in the wake of Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (1557) remains underexplored. 32 But Whitney and Gascoigne are far from alone in their focus on subjective and rather disheartened models of mobility in urban settings. As the Middle Ages give way to a more recognizably modern cultural environment, Chaucer’s model of the pilgrimage as a socially unifying event is gradually replaced by at once more subjective, more secular and less optimistic models. Hoccleve again, at the beginning of My Compleinte, written in about 1420, deliberately revises and parodies the opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue. Here, spring has given way to autumn, and rather than anticipate healing at the end of a communal pilgrimage, the narrator emphasises his isolation and the approach of death as “everybody’s conclusion”: After þat heruest inned had hise sheues, And that the broun sesoun of Mihelmesse Was come, and gan the trees robbe of her leues, That grene had ben and in lusty freisshenesse, And hem into colour of elownesse Had died and doun throwen vndirfoote, That chaunge sanke into myne herte roote. For freisshly brou te it to my remembraunce That stablenesse in this worlde is ther noon. There is noþing but chaunge and variaunce. Howe welthi a man be or wel begoon, Endure it shal not. He shal it forgoon. Deeth vndirfoote shal him þriste adoun. That is euery wi tes conclusioun. (ll. 1-14) 33 In this anti-pastoral poem, the “broun sesoun” kills the green and replaces “lusty freisshenesse” with “Deeth,” the universal conqueror who thrusts everything and everybody “vndirfoote.” The vanitas motif - “Noþing but chaunge and variaunce” - anticipates the “continual change” later lamented by Thomas Wyatt in his poem “They flee from me,” as well as Edmund Spenser’s “euer-whirling wheele / Of Change” in the Mutabilitie Cantos (VI.1.1-2). 34 32 Cf. Mary Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992; Adam Smyth, “Profit & Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640- 1682 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004). From there, a few short steps can take us to the disaffected speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets, who focuses on the “inconstant mind” of 33 Thomas Hoccleve, ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2001), 115. 34 Thomas Wyatt, “[Poem] 6 [They fle from me]” (1557), Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology, ed. Derek Pearsall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 610-11; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590-96), ed. A.C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 714. From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 15 his lover. 35 Now, the malaise described in the sonnets is not explicitly urban, but its implied social context is the world of court and city, where the self is under permanent scrutiny by others: “the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed / Not by our feeling but by others’ seeing.” 36 Also, like Hoccleve, the speaker of the sonnets at times admits to suicidal tendencies: “Tired with all these for restful death I cry.” 37 In contrast to Whitney, his is a more subjective model of lyric poetry - begging for private release rather than public acknowledgment and public consumption. While mobility for Whitney is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but a condition of life that harbours risks as well as opportunities, for the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets it is personal immobility that is a sign of power (especially “the power to hurt” 38 others): being “unmoved” 39 is the enabling condition of those who can move others: They that have power to hurt, and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow: They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces, And husband nature’s riches from expense; They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others, but stewards of their excellence. 40 Here mobility is a social weakness: the mobile individual is subject to life’s uncertainties, and there is nothing left for him but to be moved by those who wield power, those who “are themselves as stone,” immobile and permanent. As Thomas Hobbes will later argue, “Life it selfe is but motion,” 41 The flower imagery that follows this proto-sociological analysis returns to the imagery of infection also employed by Whitney: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (l. 14). On one level, the speaker seems to argue in favour of the robustness of uncultivated, unpolluted ‘nature’ (the sturdy “weeds”) compared to the etiolated, over-refined but potentially morally corrupt lily - thereby investing in the semiotisation of rural England as inherently pure and virtuous as opposed to the corruption of city life. Metaphors of sickness abound in Shakespeare’s sonnets, as they do in Hoccleve and the task of the sovereign is to remain unmoved in order to ensure the stability and security of the commonwealth. 35 William Shakespeare, sonnet 92, l. 9. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), ed. Katherine Duncan- Jones (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 295. 36 Sonnet 121, ll. 3-4, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 353. 37 Sonnet 66, l. 1, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 243. 38 Sonnet 94, l. 1, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 299. 39 Ibid., l. 4. 40 Ibid., ll. 1-8. 41 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 46 (from chapter 6). I NGO B ERENSMEYER 16 and Whitney: “My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease,” 42 but there is no longer any anticipation of a spiritual cure, of remedy or redemption. No “hooly blisful martir” 43 is expected to intercede, as in Chaucer; instead, the bath of mercury, “healthful remedy / For men diseased” 44 For the mobile (here also including the promiscuous) individual, is there a way out of this malaise? The development, during the gradual transition from manuscript to print culture, appears to be one from pilgrimage to complaint, from social network to social isolation. But there is also a counterdevelopment, simultaneous with the poetry of Whitney and Shakespeare: the rise of picaresque narrative. In the picaresque, the mobile individual asserts itself as a quasi-heroic figure. His stage is no longer the city but the world at large, the open horizon of the modern concept of reality. is a purely physical, not a metaphysical ‘solution’ to the lovesickness (i.e. venereal disease) of Shakespeare’s lonely pilgrim. 45 His literary ancestor in England (unacknowledged, slumbering in the archive until its discovery in the nineteenth century) is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here heroic suffering is replaced by embarrassment, 46 complaint is inflected towards “merry discourse.” 47 The pícaro embodies the potential of individual mobility for personal transformation and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in a capitalist economy. For example, when Meum and Tuum, the eponymous heroes of Henry Peacham Jr.’s Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum (1639), come to London, they are resolved to ‘put money in their purse,’ as Iago advises Roderigo. 48 Now by the way, if they should happen to want money, Meum resolved to take upon him the name and profession of a Physitian, and to cure all manner of diseases and griefes by stroking the part pained, and uttering some few words, by way of charme [...] Tuum would, like a Gypsey, be a teller of Fortunes, especially to Solid materialists as they are, they no longer hope for a general cure against the ills of modernity, so they dress up as doctors to profit from other people’s diseases and their gullibility: 42 Sonnet 147, ll. 1-2, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 411. 43 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, l. 17, The Riverside Chaucer 23. 44 Sonnet 154, ll. 11-12, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 427. 45 See Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton UP 1979), 29-48. 46 See Derek Pearsall, “Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the Order of Shame and the Invention of Embarrassment,” A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 351-362. 47 Henry Peacham Jr., A Merry Discourse of MEUM, And TUUM, or, MINE and THINE, Tvvo crosse Brothers, that make Strife and Debate wheresoever they come; With their Descent, Parentage, and late Progresse in divers parts of ENGLAND (London, 1639). 48 Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3. 333-37. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 2114. From Pilgrimage to Picaresque 17 widdowes and young wenches; and indeed they got hereby much money, and grew famous. 49 The pícaro learns to make a virtue of necessity and to turn his condition of individual and social mobility into a benefit, even if this is bought at the price of deceit and self-deception. 50 From the goal-oriented mobility of pilgrimage that provides a strengthening of the self through movement, and implies a return to one’s origins, the pícaro embarks on an exploration of the advantages of vagrancy, of waywardness: his road leads into a radically open, unforeseeable future, into a modernity based on taking (calculated) risks. 51 Likewise, the picaresque mode has proven highly mobile and adaptable to many different contexts, from the early novel to the road movies of our time. 52 In order to navigate these literary spaces, and to connect them to earlier modes of experiencing mobility, I have suggested a model based on cultural ecology. This model (which, as yet, is highly tentative and not fully fleshed out) might help to trace associations between the many different dimensions of mobility, personal, phenomenal, objective and textual, without reducing them to a single aspect or erasing their differences in an overarching theoretical framework, as all too often happens, for example, in discussions of ‘social mobility.’ Mobility itself is a travelling concept, difficult - perhaps impossible - to encompass in a single disciplinary structure or style of thought. This is why it is necessary to abstain from reductionist explanations and to pay attention to the many levels of mobility, separately and in their interaction, to follow their connections and ‘to go with the flow.’ 49 Peacham, A Merry Discourse 22-23. I wish to thank Angela Locatelli for drawing my attention to this text. 50 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Die prekäre Existenz des Pícaro,” Stimmungen lesen: Über eine verdeckte Wirklichkeit der Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 2011), 44-55, 52-53. 51 Cf. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002). 52 See, for instance, Christoph Ehland and Robert Fajen, eds., Das Paradigma des Pikaresken / The Paradigm of the Picaresque (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007). I NGO B ERENSMEYER 18 Works Cited Primary Works Anon. The Forrest of Fancy, Wherein is conteined very prety Apothegmes, and pleasaunt histories, both in meeter and prose, Songes, Sonets, Epigrams and Epistles, of diuerse matter and in diuerse manner. VVith sundry other deuises, no lesse pithye then pleasaunt and profytable. London, 1579. ---. The Card of Courtship, or the Language of Love; Fitted to the Humours of all Degrees, Sexes, and Conditions. Made up of all sorts of Curious and ingenious Dialogues, Pithy and pleasant Discourses, Eloquent and winning Letters, Delicious Songs and Sonnets, Fine Fancies, Harmonious Odes, Sweet Rhapsodies. London, 1653. ---. The Academy of Pleasure. Furnished with all kinds of Complementall Letters, Discourses, and Dialogues; with variety of new Songs, Sonetsm and witty Inventions. Teaching all sorts of Men, Maids, Widows, &c. to Speak and Write wittily, and to bear themselves gracefully for the attaining of their desired ends: how to discourse and demean themselves at Feasts and merry-Meetings at home and abroad, in the company of friends or strangers. How to Retort, Quibble, Jest or Joke, and to return an ingenious Answer upon any occision whatsoever. Also, a Dictionary of all the hard English words expounded. With a Poeticall Dictionary. With other Conceits very pleasant and delightfull, never before extant. London, 1656. ---. Merry Drollery, or Collection Of Jovial Poems, Merry Songs, Witty Drolleries. Intermix’d with Pleasant Catches. The First Part. Collected by W.N. C.B. R.S. F.G. Lovers of Wit. London, 1661. ---. The Art of Courtship by which Young Ladies, Gentlemen and Forreigners may be fitted with all Variety of Elegant Epistles, witty Dialogues, Eloquent expressions, Complemental Ceremonies, Amorous Answers, and lofty Language, suitable to every occasion. Also The meaner sort bee instructed how to deport or bear themselves at all times, and in all places, either to Entertaine or Associate, and how to expresse themselves fluently, to write quaintly, and likewise ingeniously. Whereunto are annexed, Many new and pleasant Odes, Epigrams, Songs, Sonnets, Posies, Presentations, Congratulations, Ejaculations, and Rhapsodies. With various and delightfull Fancies. London, 1662. ---. Wits Academy; or, the Muses Delight. Being the Newest Academy of Complements: Consisting of Merry Dialogues Upon various Occasions, Composed of Mirth, Wit, and Eloquence. As also Divers sorts of Letters Upon several Occasions, both Merry and Jocose: Helpful for the Inexpert to imitate, and Pleasant to those of better Judgment, at their own leisure to peruse. With a Perfect Collection of all the Newest and Best Songs, and Catches, That are and have been in Request at Court, and both the Theatres. London, 1696. Breton, Nicholas. Brittons Bowre of Delights. Contayning Many, most delectable and fine deuices, of rare Epitaphes, pleasant Poems, Pastorals and Sonets. London, 1591. ---. The Arbor of amorous Deusises. Wherin, young Gentlemen may reade many plesant fancies, and fine deuises: And thereon, meditate diuers sweete Conceites, to court the loue of faire Ladies and Gentlewomen. London, 1597. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 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Pearsall, Derek. “Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the Order of Shame and the Invention of Embarrassment.” A Companion to the Gawain- Poet. Eds. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. 351- 362. Perkins, Nicholas. Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001. Phillippy, Patricia. “The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and ‘Mother B’ in Isabella Whitney’s ‘A Sweet Nosegay.’” Modern Philology 95.4 (1998): 439-62. ---. “Apostrophes to Cities: Urban Rhetoric in Isabella Whitney and Moderata Fonte.” Attending to Early Modern Women. Eds. Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff. Newark, Del.: U of Delaware P, 1998. 155-75. ---. “Maidservants of London: Sisterhoods of Kinship and Labor.” Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. Eds. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 21-32. Raulff, Ulrich. Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben. Munich: Beck, 2009. Seigel, Marika A. “‘One Little Fellow Named Ecology’: Ecological Rhetoric in Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History.” Rhetoric Review 23.4 (2004): 388-404. Smyth, Adam. “Profit & Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. Smyth, Karen Elaine. Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse. London: Ashgate, 2011. Zapf, Hubert, ed. Kulturökologie und Literatur. Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008. Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Collection Poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1972. H ERBERT G RABES Support from Abroad: Early Modern English Import of Oppositional Pamphlets That there are many kinds and aspects of mobility to be found in Early Modern times should become amply evident in the course of the present discussion. This brings up the question of what the concept of ‘mobility’ actually comprises, especially in regard to the related concept of ‘change.’ On closer inspection it becomes evident that mobility always implies the ability of some sort of change, be it no more than a change of place, whereas a ‘change’ may occur even in the absence of mobility. Also changes may be so radical that no trace is left of whatever was before, whereas with mobility there must still be something left of which we can say that it moves or moved or at least can do so. A typical example are the radical sixteenth-century pamphlets dealt with in this article, texts which in the sense of fixed sequences of particular signifiers remained quite unchanged while having become quite mobile due to the new medium of print. They actually were disseminated far beyond their place of origin, with the result that they enabled a wide dissemination of ideas and opinions, even against the will of church and state. It shows that one of the most incisive influences of the invention of printing on political and cultural development was this new mobility of ideas that undermined the systems of secular and spiritual control over the souls and minds of individuals and the public at large. 1 1 See Herbert Grabes, Das englische Pamphlet I: Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit,1521-1640 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), passim. It was easy enough to silence dissenters in an oral culture by persecuting, imprisoning, and putting them to death, and it was too time-consuming and costly before the age of print to produce an amount of written copies sufficiently large to ensure a dissemination wide enough to counter any censorship. But it became increasingly difficult to seize the 900 to 1,000 copies of a print-run in those times, especially since brief texts such as pamphlets and broadsheets could easily be disseminated clandestinely and craftily concealed by those who treasured them. Of course the authorities immediately sought to adapt censorship to the new situation, above all by limiting the number of printers and rigorously controlling and intimidating them and authors by threatening such dire punishments as the cutting off of ears, the slitting of noses, and even hanging. H ERBERT G RABES 24 These measures, however, failed to silence opposition, and for the first time in European history we have something like the beginning of a genuine public sphere with a liberal exchange of ideas. This was due to two factors: the already-mentioned elusive circulation of ideas in mass printings, and lack of uniformity among dominant religious and political ideologies in neighbouring Early Modern European states. Texts of a particular kind gagged in one place could be imported from abroad, particularly when compact and easily portable. All this is not just one among many possible cultural-historical constructs of the past (to use poststructuralist New-Speak) but a solidly documented description of a particular part and aspect of what actually happened. I will endeavour to demonstrate as much in the space at my disposal by concentrating on the situation in sixteenth-century England. To a considerable extent, this demonstration will take on a positivist character, but I hope my introduction has already made clear that an array of uninterpreted facts will not do. An array of facts can be very telling, however, when it comes to making plausible a condition created by a new mass phenomenon like the dissemination of written texts printed cheaply in great quantities. Of course, it is true that texts could also be copied in medieval times and the catalogues of the monastic libraries show that until the fifteenth century copies of mostly the same texts could be found in the houses of a particular religious order all over Europe. But it took laborious weeks and months for scribes to produce even one unique copy; no chance, then, of a rapid spread of ideas via a large number of duplicated texts. * The first major oppositional movement in Britain after the introduction of printing was, of course, that of the Protestant reformers. As early as 1520, quite soon after their first publication, copies of Luther’s attack on the supremacy of the Pope and his new view of the sacraments, above all that of the altar, could be obtained from the Oxford bookseller John Dorne. 2 2 William A. Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants 1520-1535 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1964), 12. According to David Birch, Early Reformation English Polemics (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983), 22, it were Luther’s Assertio Omnium Articulorum M. Lutheri per Bullam Leonis x novissimam damnatorum (Wittenberg, 1520), B.M. Cat. 697 h 25 and De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae praeludium Martini Lutheri (Wittenberg, 1520), B.M. Cat. 3905 bbb 81 that so early found their way into England. It helped that the educated elite in Europe had a common language, Latin; the first English translations of Luther’s works date from the years 1534-1538, a period in which Henry VIII was more liberal towards the reformers. Support from Abroad 25 This had certainly not been the case in the 1520s. In 1521, there appeared under Henry’s name the Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus M. Lutherum, 3 for which the Pope accorded him the title of “Defensor fidei,” although it was most probably written by Thomas More or the bishop of Rochester, John Fisher. What we do know for sure is that Fisher preached the official sermon when Luther’s works were ceremoniously burned at Paul’s Cross on May 12, 1521, and that he was again chosen for this task at a second burning of both Luther’s and Tyndale’s works in 1525. Both sermons were subsequently printed several times and they already show many of the features of the polemical pamphleteering that was to become typical of the religious controversies of the age. In a manuscript culture, public book-burnings would have been a highly effective display, but in the 1520s of Gutenberg and Caxton they were merely a symbolic gesture, being unable, for instance, to prevent the dissemination of Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, because it was - and here we have an early example of help from abroad - printed in 1525 and 1526 beyond the reach of bishop or king in Germany 4 But this was by no means all. Besides more compendious writings, some 25 pamphlets that were printed abroad during the reign of Henry VIII (mostly in Antwerp, but also in Basle, Paris, and Wesel) were secretly imported to spread the forbidden new Protestant creed in England. One of the first is William Tyndale’s Parable of the Wicked Mammon and smuggled into the country; and between 1534 and 1538 no fewer than 17 editions subsequently appeared in Antwerp. So the attempts of both the Catholic and then the Anglican Church to suppress its dissemination clearly failed. 5 from 1528, opening with Luther’s doctrine “That faith the mother of all good workes justifieth us” and, according to the title-page, “Printed at Malborowe in the Londe of Hesse: By hans Luft” but actually by Johannes Hochstraten in Amsterdam. How effective such help from abroad must have been is evident if we realize that the king in 1529 issued A proclamation for resisting and withstanding of most dampnable Heresyses / sowen within this realme / by the Disciples of Luther and other Heretykes / perverters of Christes religion. 6 3 A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640, ed. A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, 2 nd edition, ed. W.A. Jackson. F.S. Ferguson, K. Pantzer (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976-1986), henceforward cited as STC 13078. For details of Henry VIII’s controversy with Luther see Birch, Early Reformation English Polemics, 21-30. That the threat was meant seriously is proved by the fact that in 1530 one Thomas Hitton was put to death 4 First incompletely 1525 in Cologne (STC 2823) and then in complete form 1526 in Worms (STC 2824). For the controversy with Tyndale and his associates see Birch, Early Reformation English Polemics, 30-88. 5 STC 24454. 6 STC 7772. H ERBERT G RABES 26 on the basis of this proclamation for having sold some of Tyndale’s works; and further evidence is an oppositional pamphlet entitled The Examination of Master William Thorpe 7 printed in the same year in Antwerp. In 1530 there also appeared another proclamation, By the King. For dampning of erroneous bokes, 8 which forbade the purchase of any imported books and decreed that all religious texts had to be cleared by the bishop of the diocese before being printed. These measures were not least a reaction to the appearance of two notorious anticlerical pamphlets from 1529, also printed in Antwerp: A Supplication for the Beggers 9 by Simon Fish and A proper dialogue / between a Gentilman and a husbondman / eche complaynenge to other theyr miserable calamite / through the ambicion of the clergye. 10 there is, yn the tymes of youre noble predecessours passed craftily crept into this your realme an other sort (not of impotent, but) of strong, puissant, and counterfeit holy, and ydell, beggers and vagabundes, whiche, syns the tyme of theyre first entre by all the craft and wiliness of Satan, are now encreased vunder your sight, not only into a great nombre, but also ynto a Kingdome. These are (not the herdes, but the rauinous wolues going in herdes clothing, deuouring the flocke.) the Bishoppes, Abottes, Priours, Deacons, Archedeacons, Suffraganes, Prestes, Monkes, Chanons, Freres, Pardoners and Somners. To give you an idea of just how drastic Fish’s attack on the church was, here are some lines revealing what he means by “the Beggers”: 11 In a verse dialogue written by Barlow and Roy, almost the same accusations can be found: both the gentleman and the husbandman agree that …the clergy without dowte Robbeth the hole countre rounde aboute Both comones and estates none excepte. 12 Despite the burning of Tyndale’s works, the demand for an English translation of the Bible remained acute, promoted by A compendious olde treatyse / shewynge / howe that we ought to haue y scripture in Englyshe, 13 7 STC 24045. attributed to Richard Ullerston and printed in 1530 in Antwerp, though according to the title page “Emprented at Marlborow in the lande of Hessen: Be my Hans Luft,” a forged address meant not only to mislead the censors but also to allude to the fact that Luther had produced part of his translation of the Bible into German at Marburg. That the pressure for a translation was effective is 8 STC 7775 and 7776. 9 STC 10883. 10 STC 1462.3. 11 STC 10883. 12 STC 1462.3, Fol. A.v. r . 13 STC 3021. Support from Abroad 27 shown by the fact that in 1534 even the bishops proposed to the king that there should be an English translation of the Scriptures. This does not mean, however, that they had begun to share the theological views of the reformers, as the Protestants were mostly called at that time in England, and during the entire reign of Henry VIII the pamphlets disseminating these views had to be printed abroad, secretly imported, and distributed with the utmost caution. Most of those from the 1530s came from Antwerp, one reason for which may have been that Tyndale lived there after he had to flee England. In 1531, there his sermon The Prophete Jonas 14 appeared and in 1533 a pamphlet on the Protestant interpretation of the transubstantiation, The souper of the Lorde. 15 But it was even dodgy to write and publish forbidden books and pamphlets abroad. In 1534, the year in which a new and improved translation of the Bible appeared, Tyndale was arrested on order of Henry VIII, brought to trial for heresy, and, after an imprisonment of almost two years, burnt at the stake. A similar fate was later to be suffered by John Frith, who in 1529 had published a more compendious attack on the Pope (A Pistle to the Christian Reader. The Revelation of the Anti- Christ, 16 again allegedly printed by “Hans Luft” in Marburg, but actually in Antwerp), and who kept writing subversive works even in the Tower until he was executed on July 4, 1533, among them a pamphlet on the posthumous burning of the reformer William Tracy, with the explicit title The Testament of William Tracie esquire, expounded both by William Tindall and Iho[n] Frith. Wherin Thou Shalt Perceyue with what charite y(e) chaunceler of Worcester Burned whan He Took vp the Deek carcas and made ashes of hit after hit was buried 17 (published 1535) and another one called A Mirroure. To knowe thyselfe 18 (published 1536). Having returned to England under Edward, he was burned in 1553 under Queen Mary because he refused to recant. Less unfortunate was the reformer George Joy, who fled to Germany. He, too, had his writings printed in Antwerp, among them a pamphlet against Thomas More, The Subversion of Moris False Foundacion 19 (1534); A Frutefull Treatis of Baptyme [sic] and the Lordis Souper 20 (1541); one from 1543 with the title Our Sauiour Iesus Christ hath not Overcharged his Chirche with Many Ceremonies, 21 and another from the same year called The Vnitie and Scisme of the olde Chirche. 22 14 STC 2788. 15 STC 24468. 16 STC 11394. 17 STC 24167. 18 STC 11390. 19 STC 14829. 20 STC 24217. 21 STC 14556. 22 STC 14830. H ERBERT G RABES 28 In the 1540s some translations of writings by well-known Protestants from the Continent were published, such as Heinrich Bullinger’s pamphlet The Olde Fayth 23 The last will and last confession of martyn luthers faith co[n]cerming [sic] the principle articles of religion which are in controversy, which he wil defend & mai[n]teine vntil his death, agaynst the pope and the gates of hell draw[n] furth by him at the request of the princes of germany which haue reformed theier churches after the gospel, to be offred vp at the next general councel in all their names & now published before that all the world may haue an evident testimony of his faith if it shall forune him to dye before there be any such cou[n]cel, tra[n]slated out of latyn beware of the pope & of his false prophetes and bissopes for thei wil come in shepys clothing and in angels facys but yet inwardly thei are ravening wolnys [sic]. (Antwerp 1541) and one by Luther, printed at Wesel in 1543 and bearing the more than explicit title: 24 And in the same year appeared The rekening and declaracio[n] of the faith and belief of Huldrik Zwingli. 25 The more aggressive, polemical character of much religious pamphleteering comes, however, into its own less in such theological pamphlets than in those directly aimed against the pope or the bishops. One example, John Frith’s A Pistle to the Christian Reader. The Revelation of Anti-Christ (Antwerp 1529) has already been mentioned, but there are others from the 1540s. Especially those by John Bale, whose style earned him the sobriquet “Bilious Bale,” are quite polemical - for instance, the one called Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe, 26 printed in 1543 allegedly in Zürich but actually in Antwerp, or his Answer to a papysticall exhortacyon, 27 which in 1448 also came out of Antwerp; and how similar the aggressive titles could be is shown by William Turner’s earlier The hunting and fyndyng out of the Romyshe foxe 28 More numerous, however, are those imported pamphlets from the 1540s that directly attack the Anglican bishops, in many cases by revealing their cruel treatment of individual persons. An early example is the already mentioned Examinacion of Master William Thorpe (Antwerp 1529), later ones include a pamphlet opening “Here begynnyth a traetys callyde the Lordesflayle handlyde by the bushops power thresshere Thomas Solme,” (Antwerp 1544). 29 23 STC 4070.5. allegedly from Basle but actually printed in Antwerp; George Joye’s attack on the bishop of Winchester entitled George Joye confuteth, Winchesters false arti- 24 STC 16984. 25 STC 26138. 26 STC 1309. 27 STC 1274a. 28 STC 24354. 29 STC 22897. Support from Abroad 29 cles, 30 allegedly printed at Wesel but likewise from Antwerp; A brefe chronicle concernynge the examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr Christ syr Iohan Oldcastell the lorde Cobham 31 (1544) and The Epistle exhortatorye of an Englyshe christiane vnto his derelye beloued contreye of Englande against the pompouse popyshe bysshoppes therof, as yet the true members of theyr fylthye father the great Antichrist of Rome 32 from the same year, both by John Bale and printed in Antwerp. The Epistle is the most acidulous of Bale’s pamphlets. Bale, who under Henry VIII had fled to the Low Countries, Germany, and Switzerland, became bishop of Orrery in Ireland under Edward VI, had to flee to the continent again under Mary, and returned after her death. He is also both the editor and co-author of The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe lately martyred in Smythfelde, by the Romysh popes vpholders, with the elucydacyon of Johan Bale 33 from 1546 and The latter examinacyon of Anne Askewew lately martyred in Smythfelde, by the wicked Synagoge of Antichrist, with the Elucydacyon of Iohan Bale 34 from the following year, both allegedly printed “at Marpurg in the lande of Hessen” but actually in Wesel by the well-known Protestant printer Dirik van der Straten. In the pamphlet about the first examination, Bale obviously wants to demonstrate how the charge of heresy was brought against an innocent woman through absurd questions like “whether a mouse eatynge the hoste, receyued God or no? ”; 35 And as for that ye call your God, is but a pace of breade, For a more profe therof (marke it whan ye lyst) let it lye in the boxe but iii. Monthes, and it wyll be moulde, and so tune to nothynge that is good. in the one about the second examination it is shown that she was condemned to be burned at the stake in accordance with the first of the Six Articles from 1539 because she would not accept the dogma of transubstantiation and is reported to have told bishop Gardiner something he could not possibly have countenanced: 36 A special controversy arose because the third of the conservative Six Articles, by which the king hoped to stop any reformist development in his Church, forbade priests to marry, any marriages from previous years being annulled. Support from abroad came in 1541 in the shape of three pamphlets by wellknown Protestants, all printed in Antwerp: A very godly defence, ful of lerning, defending the marriage of prietes, gathered by Philip Melanchton, [and] sent vnto the Kyng of Englond, Henry the aight, translated out of latyne into englysshe, by lewes 30 STC 14826. 31 STC 1276. 32 STC 1291. 33 STC 848. 34 STC 850. 35 STC 848, Fol. A.viii. v . 36 STC 850, Fol. D.vii. r —D.viii. v . H ERBERT G RABES 30 benchame; 37 George Joye’s The defence of the marriage of preistes; 38 and The Christen state of matrimonye 39 Most of the pamphlets that were published between the end of the reign of Henry VIII and that of Mary Tudor in 1558 are also of a religious kind and were written by reformers. As the protection of Edward VI meant that they could be printed in England, imports from abroad dwindled, being resumed only after the Catholic Mary’s accession to the throne in 1553. Once again, the reformers could only have their writings printed abroad, and their importation and dissemination was a perilous affair. While most of the earlier reformist pamphlets were printed at Antwerp, during the reign of Queen Mary they came from the Protestant north of Germany, that is, from Emden or Wesel, with some emanating from Strasburg or Geneva. by Heinrich Bullinger. Particularly at the beginning of the rigorous Catholic Counter- Reformation in 1553 and 1554, a whole number of open letters were published expressing consolation, encouragement, and admonishment of the reformers that had fled the country, exhorting their flock in England to remain true to the ‘right religion.’ An important question immediately dealt with was how far one could go in adapting to the new situation without risking eternal damnation: that is, whether inner emigration was theologically viable. Some of these pamphlets were only ostensibly printed abroad, mostly at “Roane” (Rouen? ), and a Protestant printer like John Day was obviously taking a great risk in secretly printing them in London. A typical example is the anonymous 1553 pamphlet Whether Christian faith maye be kepte in the heart, without confession openly to the worlde as occasion shal serve. Also what hurt cometh by them that receiued the Gospell, to the present at masse vnto the simple and vnlearned, 40 attributed by Bale and Coverdale to bishop John Hooper; and there are some more from 1554, one by Hooper, 41 two by Bale, 42 and an incunable, 43 that were all intentionally given this misleading origin. Most of the pamphlets of this kind, however, came from Wesel, for instance Certain homilies of m. Joan Calvine conteining profitable and necessarir, admonition[n] for this time, with an apologie by Robert Horn 44 from 1553, and, from the following year, Thomas Becon’s A comfortable Epistle, too Goddes faythfull people in Englande; 45 37 STC 17798. 38 STC 21804. 39 STC 4045. 40 STC 5160.3. 41 A Soveraign Cordial For a Christian Conscience (1554), STC 5157. 42 An Excellent And A right learned meditacion, STC 17773. 43 A Letter Sent From A banished Minister of Iesus Christ vnto the faithful Christian flocke in England (1534), STC 10016. 44 STC 4392. 45 STC 1716. Support from Abroad 31 Thomas Sampson’s A letter to the trew professors of Christes Gospel; 46 A godly letter sent too the fayethfull in London, Newcastle, Barwykw, and to all other within the realme of Englande, that loue the co[m]minge of oure Lorde Iesus by Iohn Knox. 47 At Emden there appeared An epistle written by Iohn Scory the late bishope of Chichester vnto all the faythfull that be in prison in Englande, or in any other troble for the defence of Goddes truthe 48 (1555). With regard to Luther’s A faithful admonition of a certeyne true pastor and prophete 49 From Emden also came several pamphlets teaching absolute steadfastness in one’s creed by example: A brief declaracion of the Lordes Supper, written by the singular learned man, and most constant mastir of Iesus Christ, Nicholas Ridley Bishop of London prisoner in Oxforde, a litel before he suffred deathe for the true testimonie of Christ (1554) we only know that it came from Germany. 50 (1555); Certayne godly, learned, and comfortable conferences betuuene the tuuo reuerende fathers and holye martyres of Christe, D. Nicolas Ridley late byshoppe of London, and M. Hugh Latymer, sometime bishop of Worcester, during the tyme of their emprisonmentes 51 (1556); and The copy of certain letters to the Queene, and also to doctour Martin and doctour Storye, by the most Reuerende father in God, Thomas Cranmer Archebishop of Canterbirye from prison in Oxforde: who (after long and most greuous strayt emprisoning and cruell handling) most constantly and willingly suffred Martyrdom ether, for the true testimonie of Christ, in Marche 1556. 52 And, as we know from John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments 53 Emden was also where two pamphlets addressed to the English nobility were printed, both with a primarily religious, but also political, intention: A nevv booke of spirituall physick for dyuerse diseases of the nobilitie and gentlemen of Englande, made by William Turner doctor of Physik (1563), not only the bishops Latimer, Ridley, Hooper, Ferrar and Cranmer, but very many ordinary believers, would rather suffer death at the stake than pretend to give up their religious beliefs. 54 (1555) and A short descrition of Antichrist unto the Nobilitie of Englande, and to all my brethren and countreymen borne and dwelling therin, with a warnynge to see to, that they be not deceaved by the hypocisie and crafty conveyaunce of the Clergie 55 46 STC 21683. (1557), attributed to John Old. Of both a political and religious nature were the pamphlets against the so-called ‘Spanish Marriage.’ On July 20, 1554, immediately before the mar- 47 STC 15059.5. 48 STC 21854. 49 STC 16981. 50 STC 21046. 51 STC 21047.7. 52 STC 5999. 53 Published in seven editions 1563-1632 (STC 11227-11228). 54 STC 24361. 55 STC 673. H ERBERT G RABES 32 riage of Queen Mary to Philip of Spain, there appeared in Emden A FAYTHFULL admonition made by Iohn Knox, vnto the professours of Gods truthe in Angland, wherby thou mayest learne howe God wyll haue his churche exercised with troubles, and how he defendeth it in the same, 56 a pamphlet in which - in contrast to what the title suggests - the focus is on the disastrous political and economic consequences of the marriage. And in A supplication to the queens majesty, 57 which appeared in February 1555 in three editions at Strasbourg, it is likewise the political danger for the nobility of England and the financial consequences that forms the basis of the argument. Yet the most radical positioning against the ‘Spanish Marriage’ is to be found in the pamphlet called Certayne Questions Demaunded and asked of the Noble Realme of England, of her true naturall children and Subiectes of the same, 58 allegedly printed in London but actually at Wesel. It contains questions that, a century before the beheading of King Charles I, were already shaking the foundation of the monarchical order of the state, for instance, “Whether there be two kind of tresones, one to the kynges persone, & a nother to the body of the relme …,” 59 or “Item, whether the Realme of England belong to the Quene, or to her subiectes? ” 60 Whereas the rhetoric in this pamphlet quite clearly aims at open rebellion, another one that appeared in 1555 in three editions, one at Strasburg 61 and two at Emden, 62 under the title A Warnyng for Englande / Conteynyng the horrible practises of the Kyng of Spayne / in the Kyngdome of Naples / and the miseries whereunto that noble Realme is brought. Whereby all Englishe men may understand the plage that shall light uon them / yf the Kynge od Spayn / obteyne the Dominion of Englande, contains many concrete reproaches of the Queen and the Spaniards, but only asks for penitence and prayers to God that he may destroy all traitors and save England. The widespread hatred of the Spaniards was exacerbated by the loss of Calais, due to the fact that Philip had drawn England into his war with France. While a pamphlet by Bartholomew Traheron called A Warning to England to Repente, and to Turne to god from idolatrie and poperie by the terrible exemple of Calece, given the 7. of March, Anno D. 1558, 63 56 STC 15069. most probably printed at Wesel, again asks for a change of heart and prayers for help, a much longer political tract, published by Christopher Goodman in January 1558 in Geneva, shows a quite different, aggressive attitude. How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed Of Their subiects: and wherin they may lawfully by Gods worde be disobeyed and resisted. Wherin also 57 STC 17562. 58 STC 9981. 59 Fol. A. 4. v . 60 Fol. A. 4. v . 61 STC 10014. 62 STC 10015 and 10015.5 63 STC 24174. Support from Abroad 33 is declared the cause of all this present miserie in England, and the onely way to remedy the same 64 In view of this lively oppositional pamphleteering, it is understandable that during the reign of Queen Mary censorship became increasingly rigorous. is a pamphlet aimed primarily at Queen Mary, who is held to deserve capital punishment because of her heresy, her persecution of the true believers, and for committing treason against her own country. 65 Finally, according to a proclamation of June 6, 1558, the mere possession of heretical or treasonable writings could bring capital punishment under martial law. Nevertheless, Mary was the first English ruler who not only faced a relatively broad religious and political opposition, but who was unable to silence the new medium of print and prevent the importing of oppositional pamphlets and books. * In the second half of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, there was a remarkable increase in the number of printed texts, including pamphlets. Almost all of the controversies were still of a theological kind or concerned church government, although, with the claim of Mary Stuart to the English throne and the threat of a Spanish invasion, some acute political themes were also in circulation. With the end of this phase of the Counter- Reformation upon the death of Queen Mary, a considerable number of longer and shorter attacks on the Catholics were published; but as this could be done quite openly under Elizabeth, these books and pamphlets were, of course, printed in London. And as the Catholic counter-attacks in the form of pamphlets came later, 66 one might assume that there would have been hardly any importing of oppositional pamphlets for a while. That this was not the case, however, was owing to the fact that the more radical reformers were not at all content with the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ as set down in the 1559 Parliamentary Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, which consisted in combining Protestant theology with traditional liturgy and church government. Reformers demanded a relinquishing of all ‘Romish’ ceremonies and outward signs as well as a Presbyterian reform of church government, that is, a removal of the bishops. It is no wonder that they immediately found themselves in strong opposition to the new Church authorities, who suppressed them under the contemptuous appellation of ‘Puritans.’ 67 64 STC 12020. Once again, these 65 See Frederick S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1952) and David M. Loades, “The Press under the Early Tudors: A Study in Censorship and Sedition,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 4 (1964), passim. 66 See Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age. A Survey of Printed Sources (London: The Scholar Press 1978), 3-8. 67 According to Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain … (1655) IX. i § 66; cf. OED, ‘Puritan.’ H ERBERT G RABES 34 Puritans had to have their writings printed secretly in England or abroad, 68 and antagonism first flared openly in the so-called ‘Vestments controversy’. This was triggered by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, who in March 1566 removed 37 London ministers from office after they had refused to wear the traditional gowns at an official enquiry. As a reaction, several oppositional pamphlets were printed in Emden and smuggled in: To my louynge brethren that is troublyd about the popishe apparel, two short and comfortable epistles 69 by Anthony Gilby; To my faythfull Brethren now afflicted, & to all those that unfaynedly loue the Lorde Jesus … 70 by William Whittingham; and The fortress of fathers 71 A second controversy kicked in when John Field and Thomas Wilcox, in An Admonition to the Parliament, signed “I.B.” 72 published anonymously in 1572, presented “A View of popishe abuses yet remaining in the Englishe Church,” 73 to which archbishop John Whitgift immediately answered, 74 Thomas Cartwright published a reply, 75 Whitgift defended his Answer, 76 and The second replie of Thomas Cartwright: against Doctor Whitgiftes second answer, touching the Churche discipline 77 Also in Germany, namely Cologne, two pamphlets were printed in the 1570s defending the Family of Love, a mystic religious group of Anabaptists, founded in the Netherlands by Henry Nicholis (or Niclaes) and with some colonies in England. This indicates that this sect also needed support from abroad. The first, anonymous pamphlet, A [Br]ief rehersall of [the] belief of the goodwilling [in E]nglande / which are named, the [Fame]lie of Love, was printed in Heidelberg in 1575 and therefore is of interest here. 78 is from 1575, the second one, A reproofe, spoken and geeuen-fourth by Abia Nazarenus, against all false Christians, seducing ypocrites, and enemies of the trueth and loue, 79 In the 1580s, more pro-Catholic pamphlets were printed abroad and smuggled in, such as Robert Parson’s An epistle of the persecution of Catholickes from 1579. 68 See Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). 69 STC 10390. 70 STC 10389. 71 STC 1040. 72 STC 10847. 73 Title page. 74 An Answer to a certen libel intituled, An admonition to the Parliament (1572), STC 25427. 75 A reply to An answere made of M. doctor Whitgyfte Againste the Admonition (1573), STC 4711. 76 The defense of the aunswere to the Admonition, against the Replie (1574), STC 25430. 77 STC 4714. 78 STC 10681.5. 79 STC 77. Support from Abroad 35 in England 80 (Douai 1582). After Antwerp fell into the hands of the Spaniards in 1585, it became the place where a number of recusant Catholic pamphlets were printed instead of the earlier Protestant ones. Exerting a highly negative impact on the further treatment of Catholics, especially priests, in England was A declaration of the sentence and deposition of Elizabeth, the vsurper and pretensed quene of England 81 by Pope Sixtus V, which appeared in Antwerp in 1588. The danger was that, as long as they obeyed the pope, they could from then on be charged with high treason. In 1589, at a time when even after the victory over the Armada further Spanish attempts of invasion were feared, Richard Verstegen alias Rowlands published in Antwerp The copy of a letter lately written by a Spanishe gentleman, to his friend in England, 82 and, in 1592, A declaration of the true causes of the great troubles, presupposed to be intended against the realme of England. 83 Further pro-Spanish pamphlets by Robert Parsons, A relation of the King of Spaines receiving in Valliodolid, and in the Inglish College of the same towne, in August last part of this yere. 1592 84 and Newes from Spayne and Holland 85 Yet besides the further trouble with the Jesuits and the so-called ‘Seminary Priests’ that in the 1590s had been infiltrated into England in greater numbers, the controversy between the Puritans and the Anglican bishops became fiercer after John Whitgift, ordained archbishop in 1583, had in his Articuli from the following year, were also printed there. No wonder that Queen Elizabeth, in a proclamation of 18 October 1591, demanded that all people showing sympathy for the pope or the Spaniards or who gave shelter to such people must be reported to the authorities. 86 of 1584 begun to re-implement the traditional Anglican liturgy. The result was that though the most famous attacks on the bishops, the Marprelate Tracts from 1588-89, were secretly printed in England, quite a few books and pamphlets by Puritans were again printed abroad. As Antwerp was controlled by the Spaniards, the new favourite printing place was Middelburg, where a lively trade connection regarding the wool trade existed and where a sympathizing Protestant printer was found in Richard Schilders. There appeared in 1588, for instance, The humble petition eof the communaltie to their nost [sic] renowned and gracious soveraigne the lady Elizabeth […] by the godly ministers tending to reconciliation; 87 80 STC 19406; for the controversies with the Catholics during the reign of Queen Elizabeth see Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Arthur Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). in 1590 Edward Dering’s Certain godly 81 STC 22590. 82 STC 1038. 83 STC 10005. 84 STC 19412.5. 85 STC 22994. 86 STC 4583. 87 STC 7585. H ERBERT G RABES 36 and verie comfortable letters, full of Christian consolation; 88 in 1592 Job Throckmorton’s A petition directed at her most excellent Maiestie wherein is deliuered 1 A meane howe to compound the ciuill dissention in the church of England. 2 A proofe that they who write for reformation, doe not offend against the stat. of 23.Eliz. c. and therefore till matters be compounded, deserue more fauour 89 (a pamphlet which also appeared in Geneva in 1591 under the name of Henry Barrow 90 ); in 1596 A brief apologie of Thomas Cartwright against all such slaunderous accusations as it pleaseth Mr Sutcliffe in seuerall pamphlettes most iniuriously to load him with; 91 in 1599 Andrew Willet’s A Christian letter of certaine English protestants, vnfained fauourers of the present state of religion, authorised and professed in England 92 which was directed at Richard Hooker, who, in 1594-97, had published his comprehensive and learned critique of the Puritan position, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie; and Hugh Broughton’s Declaration of generall corruption of religion, Scripture and all learning; wrought by D. Bilson… 93 of 1603 also came from Middelburg. At Dort, where the famous Synod of Dort was somewhat later to take place, a pamphlet appeared in 1596 called The examinations of Henry Barrow Iohn Greenwood and John Penrie, before the high commissioners, and Lordes of the Counsel. Penned by the prisoners themselves before their deathes, 94 while John Penry’s earlier confession I Iohn Penry, doo heare as I shall answere before the Lord my God in that great day of iudgement set downe summarily the whole truth and nothing but the truth which I hold and professe at this hower… 95 The full importance of the much increased mobility of ideas and opinions by means of the new medium of print can, of course, only become evident when not only the oppositional pamphlets but also the longer tracts and whole books printed abroad and secretly imported are included in the picture. But an overview of the pamphlets alone shows that the loss of the monopoly of influence on public opinion was to reduce radically the prospects of sustaining the former monopoly of political power and the ability to impose a particular religious creed on the people. With regard to further developments in Britain, it may suffice at this point to mention that more than twenty-two thousand pamphlets are extant from the time of the Civil War, when censorship broke down, and there was clearly an overwhelming variety and mobility of views circulating in the country, to the point of confusion. But if that was an exceptional situation, there is no question that the far from 1593 is only known to have been printed abroad, but not exactly where. 88 STC 6682.5. 89 STC 1521. 90 STC 1522 a. 91 STC 4706. 92 STC 13721. 93 STC 3855. 94 STC 1519. 95 STC 19608. Support from Abroad 37 greater efficiency of today’s media means that we have to somehow cope constantly with such variety and mobility - often to the point where the confusion of the cyberworld and transglobal importation are so insidious and invisible as to be beyond the control not only of church and state, but of ourselves as individuals, with or without creed. Yet what history can teach us is that it still seems better for a society to risk some confusion than to find itself in a situation in which mobility in terms of a circulation of ideas and opinions or even physical mobility is tightly controlled and the narrow framework of a particular political ideology or a particular religious confession is forced upon the people by strict censorship and even brutal force of an authoritarian state. It is worth noting that Oliver Cromwell, who started out to build a new Jerusalem in England, is reported to have said towards the end of his life that what in looking back on the period of his rule he was most proud of was that none of the different sectarian groups with political dreams he relied on ever became dominating. H ERBERT G RABES 38 Works Cited Birch, David. Early Reformation English Polemics. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983. Clebsch, William A. England’s Earliest Protestants 1520-1535. New Haven, CT: Greenwood Press, 1964. Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fuller, Thomas. The Church History of Britain. 1655, ed. James Nichols, 3 vol. London: Thomas Tegg, 1837. Grabes, Herbert. Das englische Pamphlet I: Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit (1521-1640). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. Loades, David M. “The Press under the Early Tudors: A Study in Censorship and Sedition,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 4 (1964): 29-50. Luther, Martin. Assertio Omnium Articulorum M. Lutheri per Bullam Leonis x novissimam damnatorum. Wittenberg, 1520. ---. De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae praeludium Martini Lutheri. Wittenberg, 1520. Marotti, Arthur, ed. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Milward, Peter. Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age. A Survey of Printed Sources. London: The Scholar Press, 1978. Pollard, A.W. and G.R. Redgrave, eds. A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640, 2 nd edition, ed. W.A. Jackson. F.S. Ferguson, K. Pantzer. 2 vols. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976-1986; vol. 3: Katherine F. Pantzer, ed. A Printers’ and Publishers’ Index, Other Indexes & Appendices, Cumulative Addenda & Corrigenda. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1991. Siebert, Frederick S. Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1952. A NDREW H ADFIELD Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe Thomas Nashe’s life, like his fiction, was structured around journeys. However, this should not be taken to mean that Nashe celebrated mobility. He did not travel a great deal, even by the standards of an age when movement from one place to another was difficult, often discouraged, and strictly regulated. 1 He left Lowestoft, Suffolk, his birthplace, to study at St. John’s College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1582. He then left Cambridge to go to London in 1588, and remained in the city for much of the rest of his life, apart from a visit to stay with Sir George Carey on the Isle of Wight, Christmas 1593, probably his one journey overseas. We also know that he stayed with the antiquary, Robert Cotton, in Conington, Huntingdonshire, just over fifty miles from London, in February 1593. He was forced to leave London in 1597, after the play he wrote with his friend, Ben Jonson, The Isle of Dogs, proved too controversial for the censors. After it was performed at one of the Bankside Theatres, the authorities promptly closed down all the theatres and Nashe fled to Great Yarmouth, staying in the country for another year or so. It is quite likely that he returned to London before he died, perhaps to work with some of his friends, but he may well have been forced to flee again after he was named in the Bishops’ Ban of 1 June 1599, an edict which prohibited the publication of satire and some forms of historical works. Nashe probably died in 1601, no one knows where or how. He therefore lived almost all of his life within a triangle between London, Cambridge and the East Anglian coast. 2 Nashe does not habitually represent travel or movement favourably and it is always associated with hardship, misery and, above all, waste in his writings. Jack Wilton, the unfortunate traveller, learns the hard way that travel does not necessarily teach the traveller anything. After he is saved from being executed in Rome for a crime that he did not commit - the first of three tales of executions that characterise Wilton’s experience in the city - Wilton visits the English earl whose testimony of what he heard in a barber’s 1 A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985); Clare Howard, English Travellers of the Renaissance (London: John Lane, 1914), ch. 6. 2 On Nashe’s life, see Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge, 1984). A NDREW H ADFIELD 40 shop reprieved his compatriot to thank him. The earl delivers a devastating speech warning Wilton that travel is a futile and delusive process: Countriman, tell me, what is the occasion of thy straying so farre out of England to visit a strange Nation? If it bee languages, thou maiest learne them at home; nought but lasciousnesse is to bee learned here. Perhaps, to be better accoupted of than other of thy condition, thou ambitiously vndertakest this voyage: these insolent fancies are but Icarus feathers, whose wanton waxe, melted against the Sunne, will betray thee into a sea of confusion. The first traueller was Cain, and he was called a vagabond runnagate on the face of the earth. Trauaile (like the trauaile wherein smithes put wilde horses when they shoo them) is good for nothing but to tame and bring men vnder. God hath no greater curse to lay vpon the Israelites, than by leading them out of their owne countrey to liue as slaues in a strange land. That which was their curse, we Englishmen count our chiefe blessednesse; hee is no bodie that hath not traueld[.] 3 The earl’s speech continues for several pages, arguing that the foolish English are easy targets for unscrupulous foreigners eager to take advantage of them, and that English travellers return home much worse than they were before. In the fictional earl’s eyes, mobility should be avoided at all costs. Those Englishmen who choose to travel will learn a series of terrible habits from each country: from contact with the French they will learn to be deceitful and obsessed with pointless gradations of good taste; from Spain they will learn to be boastful; from Italy, a host of bad habits, “the art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of Sodomitie,” as well as the devious art of the courtier; and from the Danes and the Dutch they will learn excessive drinking (300-02). Of course, the earl’s speech cannot be taken at face value: he is an exile, and so craves the delights of stasis in the same way that the restricted and the sedentary desire the freedom of movement, as his last sentence reveals: “The diuel and I am desperate, he of being restored to heauen, I of being recalled home” (303). But he makes a telling point that is hard to dispute and which cuts to the heart of what is at stake in travel and travel writing: “What is here but we may read in bokes, and a great deale more too, without stirring our feete out of a warme Studie? ” (299). Nashe is making a pointed joke that challenges the reader to think about what we can possibly learn from leaving our homes to see other places. The earl’s stereotypes of Europeans show that he has learned nothing from his experience of travel and he is right that he would be better off staying at home as he simply repeats what he has learned from the accounts of other travellers. But then, he is a fictional character cre- 3 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), II, 297. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 41 ated by Nashe, so what the earl says does not have to be taken at face value. Nashe never went abroad, so perhaps one of his points may be the opposite of what he seems to mean, that actually travelling does provide us with real knowledge. 4 On the other hand, questions remain. It is perhaps true that information about other countries is best learned without ever visiting them. Virtually all Englishmen and women learned about the world from books, images and conversation in a time when mobility was severely restricted. After all, the earl is an earl, one of the elite classes who could be granted a license to travel by the queen, and Jack is a soldier, the only way that most non-elite men got to see Europe (sailors could travel further afield). Travel certainly taught such men relatively little about other countries, and, if they returned home, they were likely to have witnessed as much death and destruction as Jack - if not more. Nashe, although he never served in the army himself, would have known a large number of soldiers in London, especially as so many writers spent time in the army. 5 Most significant of all, perhaps, is the question of the transmission of knowledge and whether actually travelling is the most efficient means of acquiring knowledge, or whether there should be one class of person who travels and another who interprets what that person has seen and recorded, a division between the mobile and stationary. This was a central point made by Montaigne in his essay “Of the Caniballes,” in which he relies on the eye-witness account of a servant, “a simple and rough-hewen fellow: a condition fit to yield a true testimony.” 6 Travel writers who did not travel - like, for example, Richard Hakluyt - were always dependent on what others told them. 7 Another way of looking at the same problem was to work out which was the greater evil, travelling or interpreting travellers’ tales. Travel in the early modern world could be a grim affair, even within England itself. Roads were invariably awful, making conditions at best very uncomfortable, and a rate of twenty miles per day was quite reasonable, even by horse (so Nashe could have taken nearly three days to get to Conington). There was the risk of be- Perhaps they were like Montaigne’s servant; perhaps, more like Nashe’s exiled earl. In the end it would be up to the listener/ reader to decide. 4 An argument that is implicit in Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh’s interesting collection, Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 5 See D.J.B. Trim, “The Art of War: Martial Poetics from Henry Howard to Philip Sidney,” in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 587-605. 6 Cited in Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: An Anthology of Travel and Colonial Writing, 1550-1650 (Oxford UP, 2001), 287. 7 See Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007). A NDREW H ADFIELD 42 ing held up by highwaymen, especially as one travelled further away from the major cities. Waterways were rather better, but they were slow, limited by geography and were generally used for trade. Most people did not move more than a few miles from where they were born until well into the nineteenth century. Those who could afford a horse did move around much more, mainly, however, within quite restricted areas. There was a ring of houses around London which is where most significant aristocrats lived when they were not in the capital; others had a second residence a little further afield. People who lived beyond these areas tended to come to London less frequently and had much more pronounced regional identities, remaining within their home areas. 8 The problem became more acute when travellers went abroad. Crossing the Channel or the Irish Sea was hazardous in itself, and often boats were delayed for long periods while sailors waited for favourable winds and tides. 9 There was always the danger of pirates in the seas and then of being attacked by bandits on one’s travels throughout Europe. 10 There were further dangers and discomforts: financial hardship, especially the possibility of being exploited by unscrupulous locals; the chance of catching various illnesses, in particular, as a result of rather too much pleasure. In many ways conditions had not improved that much in the last two hundred years, the technological revolutions that made travel more comfortable happening over a hundred years after Nashe’s death. 11 All told, for commentators like Roger Ascham, the disadvantages of travel abroad outweighed the advantages by some distance and the best that could be achieved was a waste of time. Ascham’s observations on Italy, published 8 For details, see Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009); J. Crofts, Packhorse, Wagon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications under the Tudors and Stuarts (London: Routledge, 1967); Mark Brayshay, “Royal Post-Horse Routes in England and Wales: The Evolution of the Network in the Later-Sixteenth and Early-Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991): 373-89; Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison and Brian Chalkley, “Knowledge, Nationhood and Governance: The Speed of the Royal Post in Early- Modern England,” Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998): 265-88. For one account of a regional identity, see A.L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (London: Cape, 1941). 9 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), ch. 2. 10 Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667 (rev. ed., New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), passim. 11 See Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveller, trans. Caroline Hillier (Cambridge: Boydell, 1989); Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and Restless (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982). Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 43 posthumously in 1570, surely lie behind Nashe’s sardonic representation of Italy as a land of cruel, cynical luxury in The Unfortunate Traveller: I was once in Italie my selfe: but I thanke God, my abode there, was but ix. dayes: And yet I sawe in that little tyme, in one Citie, more libertie to sinne, than ever I hard tell of in our noble Citie of London in ix. Yeare. I sawe, it was there as free to sinne, not onelie without all punishment, but also without any mans marking, as it is fre in the Citie of London, to chose, without all blame, whether a man lust to weare Shoo or pantofle [fashionable slipper][...] Yea, the Lord Maior of London, being but a Civill officer, is commonlie for his tyme, more diligent, in punishing sinne, the bent enemie against God and good order, than all the bloodie Inquisitors in Italie be in seaven yeare. 12 Jack witnesses a riot of pleasure and murder in Italy, the graphically described violent executions serving no purpose other than to satisfy a cruel blood lust. The connection that the Italians make between death and lust is made clear to Jack when he moves down from Florence to Rome with his mistress: Attained thether [i.e., in Rome], I was lodged at the house of one Iohannes de Imola, a Roman caualiero. Who, being acquainted with my curtesans deceased doting husband, for his sake vsed vs with all the famili-|aritie that might bee seene, which are as manye as there haue beene Emperours, Consulles, Oratours, Conquerours, famous painters or plaiers in Rome. Tyll this daie not a Romane (if he be a right Romane indeed) will kill a rat, but he will haue some registered remembraunce of it (II, 279). What seems like a virtue is really a vice. In other cultures looking after those connected with the deceased would be kindly, proper behaviour; but here, there is a morbid connection between love and death, a strange desire to remain connected to the dead, as if they could somehow be kept alive through the objects and the people with which they were associated. Furthermore, this attitude also engenders an indifference to life, as Jack discovers when he is nearly executed, his last confession made, his head put inside the noose and the hangman’s “foote on [his] shoulder to presse [him] downe” (296), before he is reprieved, significantly enough, at the very last second by his fellow countryman. Jack almost became one of the rats remembered only through their sentimental associations with the living, a spectrum of warped thought that preserves the memory of the dead in the same way that relics commemorate the deceased almost as if they were still alive. Or, put another way, removes the need to worry about death. Inter-continental travel was, of course, far worse still. Voyages were incredibly dangerous. Richard Hore’s attempt to charter a tourist voyage to Newfoundland in 1536 “ended in misery, starvation, and even cannibalism” 12 Hadfield, ed., Amazons, 22. A NDREW H ADFIELD 44 when the William had to anchor on the south coast of Newfoundland. 13 Many died in ferocious storms, including Humphrey Gilbert (1537-83), last seen, with book in hand, shouting over to the Golden Hind, “We are as near to heaven, by sea as by land.” 14 Others, like Francis Drake, of disease. The Roanoke Colony disappeared in the early 1580s, as Nashe would have known. 15 Natives were not always friendly, and European readers would have known that while many of the Northern peoples whom Protestant colonists met were relatively civilised and friendly, those that the Spanish encountered tended to be rather nastier, often forcing molten gold down the throats of rapacious Europeans, or eating them in ritual feasts, like the frightening Amazonian women of Brazil. 16 Travel, and the implied imperial expansion that went with it, were not regarded as unqualified benefits by everyone. An argument has been put forward that many opposed the idea of empire outright, arguing instead that the English should concentrate on establishing the identity and success of their nation within the already established boundaries. 17 It is also clear that many writers were anxious about expansion and the dilution of English identity that was likely to result from expanding boundaries, taking over other nations, or establishing colonies abroad, both within the British Isles and beyond. Expansion may have been a necessary evil, but it was not something that could or should be celebrated. Writers felt it their duty to warn their readers of the problems that absorbing other nations, people and cultures would involve. If England did become an empire, English identity could not be taken for granted as it would have to evolve and change to accommodate new peoples and places. 18 Matthew Day has made a persuasive case that Nashe strongly opposed the ideological thrust of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, There was a price to be paid for mobility, one not worth paying. 13 Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A. D. 500- 1600 (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), 237-8. 14 Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation. (London: Everyman, 1907). See also the description in Peter C. Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery (New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 392-40. 15 Karen Ordhal Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984). 16 Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (London: The British Museum Press, 2007). 17 Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992). 18 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); Andrew Hadfield, “Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain,” Review of English Studies, NS, 51 (2000): 599-616. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 45 Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). 19 Hakluyt argued that Protestant England urgently needed to expand and populate the Americas in order to oppose the might of the Spanish Empire, which was already far advanced by the second half of the sixteenth century. If they failed to challenge the Spanish, exporting the religious conflict in Europe to the New World, then their enemies would establish a power base that could not be defeated and the fragile Protestant nations, led by England, were in danger of being overwhelmed. Hakluyt was clear that it was his duty to warn his complacent fellow countrymen of the perils they faced, mobilising their resistance by reminding them of the heroic endeavours that they had undertaken in the past, through the compilation of his magnum opus. 20 The immediate spur for Nashe’s hostility to Hakluyt was undoubtedly the fact that his arch opponent, Gabriel Harvey, heaped enthusiastic praise on the Principall Navigations. Hakluyt was no traveller, and like the English earl in The Unfortunate Traveller, preferred to work in the comfort of a warm study than to seek out new lands himself. 21 In Pierce Supererogation Harvey launched a carefully prepared attack on Nashe, first praising the most worthy contemporary writers: “Ingland, since it was Ingland, neuer bred more honourable mindes, more aduenturous hartes, more valorous handes, or more excellent wittes, then of late.” 22 read the report of the worthy Westerne diswcourses, by the said Sir Humphrey Gilbert : the report of the braue West-Indian voyage by the conduction of Sir Francis Drake : the report of the horrible Septentionall discoueries by the trauail of Sir Martin Frobisher : the report of the politique discouery of Virginia, by the Colony of Sir Walter Raleigh : the report of sundry other famous discoueries, & aduentures, published by M. Rychard Hackluit in one volume, a worke of importance : the report of the hoatt wellcom of the terrible Spanishe Armada to the coast of Inglande, that came in glory, and went in dishonour : the report of the redoubted voyage into Spaine, and Portugull, whence the braue Earle of Essex, and the two valorous Generals, Sir Iohn Norris, and Sir Francis Drake returned with honour: the report of the resolute encounter about the Iles Azores, betwixt the Reuenge of Ingland, and an Armada of Spaine; in which encounter braue Sir Rich- He contrasts the serious work of George Gascoigne, Thomas Drant, George Turbervile, and Roger Ascham to the “phantasticall bibblebables” of Nashe, which “might haue bene tollerated in a greene, and wild youth” (Sig. G v ). The list culminates in Harvey’s praise of Hakluyt, as he urges his reader to 19 Matthew Day, “Hakluyt, Harvey, Nashe: The Material Text and Early Modern Nationalism,” Studies in Philology 104 (2007): 281-305. 20 Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing, 97-105. 21 On the Nashe-Harvey quarrel, see Nashe, Works, V, introduction, 65-110. 22 Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation or A New Prayse of the Old Ass: A preparatiue to certaine larger discourses, intituled Nashes s. fame (London, 1593), Sig. G r . Subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. A NDREW H ADFIELD 46 ard Grinuile most vigorously & impetuously attempted the extreamest possibilities of valour and fury (Sigs. G1 v -G2 r ). Harvey is reading Hakluyt exactly as Hakluyt intended, citing his great compilation as a means of demonstrating the heroic history of the English, seeking out far-flung places to colonise and so civilise, thus protecting their shores against hostile invaders. Harvey continues, citing examples of English trade spreading abroad, concluding by weighing up “the course of Industry” and “consequents of Trauail,” which “found profit to be our pleasure, prouision our security, labour our honour, warfare our welfare,” against what Nashe and his ilk produce, “corrupt pamphlets… paultringe fidlefaddles” (Sigs. G2 r-v ). The long passage concludes with a reference to “the ruines of Troy” discovered by Alexander, which inspires the great conqueror to demand the “Harpe of Achilles” to lead him to further military glory. Harvey is arguing that his fellow Englishmen should adopt similar attitudes in contrast to the debilitating fare offered them in the pamphlets of Nashe and Greene. The central reference is to The Iliad, the great epic that is now transferred through the familiar process of translatio imperii from ancient Greece to contemporary England. Harvey is further contrasting the folio volume to the pamphlet; the serious to the trivial; the inspirational work to the debilitating; the national to the local; and what he is doing to what Nashe is doing. 23 Nashe responded to these taunts in Lenten Stuffe, published in 1599, his rambling, digressive and brilliantly satirical praise of the red herring, written after he had retreated to Great Yarmouth in the wake of the Isle of Dogs scandal. The fact that Nashe could still hark back to a pamphlet written by his opponent in 1593 shows how important certain issues were for both writers. In the meanwhile he had taken up Harvey’s challenge and seems to have read The Principall Navigations immediately after reading Pierce Supererogation. In his first response, the last of his tracts excoriating Harvey, Haue with you to Saffron Walden (1596), Nashe refers to Hakluyt about twenty times. His aim is to create a genuine public sphere of writers all contributing to the advancement of England and English culture in their various ways, which does not preclude Nashe’s methods, but does involve attacking his scurrilous and wasteful aims. 24 On the first page of Lenten Stuffe Nashe recounts the events leading up to his writing the book in a series of neat twists and reversals. The Isle of Dogs turned “from a commedie to a tragedie two summers past,” leading to “a The vast sweep and geographical range of Hakluyt’s text is pointedly contrasted to the injunction that Harvey return to his home town, a demand that not only predicted Nashe’s own return home in 1597, but predicted the fate of Harvey after the Bishops’ Ban. 23 For a splendid analysis, see Day, “Hakluyt, Harvey, Nashe,” 290-1. 24 Day, “Hakluyt, Harvey, Nashe,” 299; Nashe, Works, V, 125. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 47 general rumour that hath filled all England, and such a heauie crosse laide vpon me, as had well neere confounded mee.” In his profound misery, Nashe went “beyond my greatest friendes reach to recouer mee,” and was forced into “exile” where “the silliest millers thombe or contemptible stickele-bank of my enemies is as busie nibbling about my fame as if I were a deade man throwne amongst them to feede vpon” (V, 153). This is a densely allusive and subtly nuanced opening passage, which shows how things can be turned and transformed by will and by fate. The tenor of the passage seems downbeat, perhaps even humble in its acknowledgement of the reversals of fortune, as comedy becomes tragedy. But, of course, this was no accident, as the lost play clearly must have insulted many of the great and good, the Isle of Dogs being the place where the queen kept her hounds, which suggests that the island was used as a representation of the court, with the courtiers seen as sycophantic, needy, aggressive and scarcely human dependents feeding off the monarch. As David Riggs has commented, what we know about the play “indicate[s] that it was an exceedingly subversive play.” 25 Lenten Stuffe takes as its subject an everyday object, the red herring, traditionally ordinary fare eaten by the poor, and by the better off in Lent, and shows how it is actually the worthy focus of heroic legend, one of the most Nashe’s fate looks bad if his words are read superficially, but his words suggest that his misfortune and the persecution that he suffers are really signs of his importance and achievement, which go beyond what even he had imagined beforehand. In his apparent abjection, Nashe judges himself to be the figure whose actions create rumours that fill all of England, leading to an exceedingly cheeky comparison of himself to Christ carrying the cross. Gabriel Harvey might think that Nashe is trivial, but the rest of the nation disagrees and casts its eyes towards Nashe. Nashe, pretending to be humiliated, is actually showing that what he does eclipses and obliterates the apparently important works that Harvey recommends, in particular, Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations. In fact, it is his enemies - again, the principal target is Harvey - who are trivial in their complaints against him, unable to realise the significance of what he has achieved. While Harvey, for all his attempts at humour, solemnly pronounces on the great works of the English nation, Nashe shows that everyone is looking in the wrong place. What people think is great is actually trivial, and what they imagine to be trivial is really important. They might imagine - or hope - that he is dead, but, in writing Lenten Stuffe, he will show them how profound he can be if only read properly. He is an exile, like the earl in The Unfortunate Traveller, and like him, he is in a position to utter serious truths about England and the ways in which its boundaries should expand or contract. 25 David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989), 32. A NDREW H ADFIELD 48 noble foodstuffs, a glory that sustains the nation. 26 Again, especially given the title of his previous work, there is a pointed contrast between Nashe and Harvey, the latter coming from a more up-market place, one that obtained its name from the daffodils grown there. Saffron was a much valued commodity that produced yellow dye, a colour of high status, one of the key jokes against the social-climbing Malvolio in Twelfth Night. 27 Nashe’s range of allusions carefully echoes Harvey’s chain of connections in Pierce Supererogation. In a provocatively disgusting image Nashe compares the effects of the hospitality he receives in Great Yarmouth to a well-known story about Homer: In imitation of Harvey Nashe assembles ponderous lists of different categories of important and valuable examples of intellectual property, weaving together different textual elements, styles and registers to make his points. He describes his journey to Yarmouth in terms familiar to any reader of romance, as “variable Knight arrant aduentures and outroades and inroads, at greate Yarmouth in Norfolke I ariued in the latter ende of Autumne.” Adopting one of his earlier pseudonyms, Nashe then proclaims that “this is a predestinate fit place for Piers Pennilesse to set vp his staffe in” (154). Tooke I vp my repose, and there mete with such kind entertainment and begnigne hospitality when I was Vna litera plusquam medicus, as Plautus saith, and not able to liue to my selfe with my owne iuce, as some of the crummes of it, like the crums in a bushy beard after a great banquet, will remaine in my papers to bee seene when I am | deade and vnder ground ; from the bare perusing of which, infinite posterities of hungry Poets shall receiue good refreshing, euen as Homer by Galataeon was pictured vomiting in a bason (in the temple that Ptolomy Philopater erected to him) and the rest of the succeeding Poets after him greedily lapping vp what he disgorged. (154-5) Nashe does not say that he consumes so much that he is sick, as the actual comparison is between the crumbs that he leaves behind in his papers, and Homer vomiting, the leavings of each poet being greedily consumed by subsequent writers. But the nature of the comparison invites the reader to make this connection and to conclude that even Nashe behaving at his lowest is more valuable than other writers’ most high-brow efforts. Furthermore, there is surely a reference to the death of Robert Greene, who apparently expired 26 See Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume IV, 1500-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967), 1- 112, at 46. 27 On saffron and Saffron Walden, see Joan Thirsk, “Farming Techniques,” in Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History, 161-99, at 175; on yellow, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 63- 85. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 49 after a “surfeit of pickle herringe and Rennish wine,” 28 A key target here is Harvey’s reference to Homer, and Nashe is picking up Harvey’s citations of Homer and Homeric themes at key points in Pierce Supererogation. This point is secured by the next reference to Homer as “That good old blind bibber of Helicon,” a direct quotation from Harvey. as Harvey had reported soon afterwards. 29 Nashe deliberately plays on the more lowbrow stories of Homer’s life, bringing Harvey’s exalted register back to the demotic, but also demonstrating that there is an erudition that can undermine the pretensions of the literary social climber while signalling the user’s rootedness in the stuff of everyday life, rather than the pointless mobility of imperial expansion. While Harvey wants to think about the Iliad, Nashe would like to remind readers that there was another side to Homer. What links both references, a suppressed but vital connection, is Homer’s other epic of travel, The Odyssey. Nashe deliberately skirts around this issue in developing the comparison between himself and Homer, by making two negative comparisons. First he states: “I alleadge this tale to shewe howe much better my lucke | was then Homers, (though all the King of Spaines Indies will not create me such a niggling Hexameter-founder as he was)” (155-6). Then, a few sentences later he claims: “I am no Tiresias or Calchas to prophecie, but yet I cannot tell, there may bee more resounding bel-mettall in my pen then I am aware, and if there bee, the first peale of it is in Yarmouthes” (156). Nashe is showing that he knows everything about Homer: both his epics and the slightly sordid tales of his personal life, producing the last first before revealing his literary sophistication. His epic tale of Yarmouth is to be set against the epics of ancient Greece, as well as the epics and romances of the modern world, which have inspired the Spanish to conquer the New World. 30 Nashe adapts part of the story of the foundation of Britain from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britainniae, and makes it resolutely local. Great Yarmouth is described as “A towne it is that in rich situation exceedeth many citties, and without the which, Caput gentis, the swelling Battlementes of Gurguntus, a head citty of Norffolke and Suffolke, would scarce retaine the name of a Citty, but become as ruinous and desolate as Thetforde or Ely” (156). Gurguntius, or Gurgunt Barbitruc, was the legendary king of the Britons after Belinus, the first king to rule all of Britain. He was a warrior seaking and was best remembered for establishing the British Empire by con- 28 Gabriel Harvey, Fovr Letters and certaine sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene (1592), ed. G.B. Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1966), 13. 29 Harvey, Pierce Supererogation, Sig. V1 v . 30 On this often-analysed subject, see, for example, David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992); Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). A NDREW H ADFIELD 50 quering the Danes after they refused to pay him tribute; discovering the Orkneys; and giving Partholoim, a Spanish exile, permission to settle in Ireland, one of the key claims that the Britons had to rule Ireland, frequently used later to legitimise English possession. 31 Warming to his theme, Nashe moves forward in history as he looks out at the fleet of fishing boats in the harbour: Nashe translates these epic stories of national self-definition and discovery to a regional context so that Gurguntius becomes the ruler known for building the battlements on Great Yarmouth’s city walls, defences that have preserved the city and prevented it from becoming as enfeebled as Thetford and Ely. The joke becomes more pointed as a comment on regional pride if the reader knows that both towns had more illustrious pasts than Great Yarmouth. Thetford was known as the stronghold of Boudicca, later the seat of the Anglo-Saxon kings of East England, and then became a bishopric in the Middle Ages; Ely was also an important religious centre with a magnificent cathedral. The Suffolk town of Great Yarmouth, in contrast, although wealthy, had a much less impressive history than its Norfolk rivals. Nevertheless, its future might well be rather brighter. The delectablest lustie sight and mouingest obiect, me thought it was, that our Ile sets forth, and nothing behinde in number with the inuincible Spanish Armada, though they were not such Gargantuan boisterous gulliguts as they, though ships and galleasses they would haue beene reckoned in the nauy of K. Edgar; who is chronicled & registred with three thousand ships of warre to haue scoured the narrow seas, and sailed round about England euery Summer. (157-8) The splendid fleet of Yarmouth fishing boats resembles the Armada, and also that of the Saxon king, Edgar, whose naval exploits helped establish the British Empire. Hakluyt describes Edgar as “one of the perfect Imperiall Monarches of this British Empire,” famous for his “grand navie” of 4000 ships, which he divided into four equal parts for “his Sommer progresses… sailing round about this whole Isle of Albion.” 32 31 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 100-01. On English claims to Ireland using the British legends, see Andrew Hadfield, “Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins,” Irish Historical Studies 112 (1993): 390-408. Nashe’s subtle move here is not to contrast the strength of Edgar’s navy to that of the defeated Armada, so making a patriotic point that would support the purpose of Hakluyt’s extensive folios. Rather, he sets the ships in Yarmouth harbour against those of the best Spanish and English fleets, making an analogous point to the one about Gurguntius. England’s true glory lies in her local identities and the constituent parts of the nation that make the whole when put together, not 32 Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 8 vols. (London: Everyman, 1907), I, 63, 67. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 51 the delusion of expansion dictated by the powerful: her citizens should be looking inwards, not outwards. The use of the adjective “Gargantuan,” the first recorded in the OED - although it is a response to Harvey’s coinage, “Gargantuist” in Pierce Supererogation - refers to Rabelais’ prose epic of excess, appetite and bodily functions, which both Harvey and Nashe had undoubtedly read in French. 33 Having made these connections, exactly the same ones that Harvey made in Pierce Supererogation but now used in a radically different way, Nashe indulges in more extensive - and extensively referenced - parodies throughout the narrative. In one substantial passage Nashe uses the rhetorical trope occupatio (paralepsis), which, according to Abraham Fraunce, was “A kind of irony, a kind of pretended omitting or letting slip of that which indeed we elegantly note out in the very show or praetermission.” The reference supports the point made about Homer earlier: high status literature does not simply refer to high status people and events and certainly does not preclude reference to the lives and concerns of ordinary people. Nashe is also asserting his ability to read Rabelais properly, as a writer of the people, whose subjects might well include eating and vomiting. In doing so he reminds his readers that even Homer did these things, a lesson that the literal-minded Harvey cannot get right with his insistence that high-minded writers only wrote about high-minded affairs. 34 I mused how Yarmouth should be inuested in such plenty and opulence, considering that in M. Hackluits English discoueries I haue not come in ken of one mizzen mast of a man of warre bound for the Indies or Mediterranean sterne-bearer sente from her Zenith or Meridian, Mercuriall brested M. Harborne always accepted, a rich sparke of eternity first lighted and enkindled at Yarmouth, or there first bred and brought forth to see the light, who since, in the hottest degree of Leo, hath echoing noysed the name of our Ilande and of Yarmouth so Tritonly that not an infant of the curtaild skinnclipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their Prophets tombe at Maecha, & as much worships our maidenpeace as it were but one sun that shin’d ouer them all (173). Nashe claims that he has scoured Hakluyt for references to Great Yarmouth and found none, and so wonders how it can be so successful and wealthy: The exception of William Harborne (c. 1542-1617), the first English ambassador to Turkey, who was born in Great Yarmouth, proves the rule, and leads to a digression, one of the ‘red herrings’ that gives Lenten Stuffe its title. 35 33 Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of his Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 112, 157. Harvey’s reference is in Pierce Supererogation, Sig. S4 v . We all realise that Harborne just happens to have been born in Great Yarmouth and he does not endlessly advertise this fact so that the town is as well- 34 Cited in Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 1968), 135-6. 35 On Harborne, see the ODNB entry by Christine Woodhead. A NDREW H ADFIELD 52 known throughout the Ottoman Empire as Mohammed’s tomb at Mecca; nor does Hakluyt mention Harborne’s birthplace. The last section of the sentence undercuts the rest when the reader realises that the same sun does indeed shine over both the Ottomans and the English. One does not need to travel there to realise this banal fact. The point is that there are basic concerns that everyone has, wherever they live and whatever they do, and no movement is required to understand this, exactly as the fictional earl in The Unfortunate Traveller claimed. Certain key aspects of life are the same whether people live in Yarmouth or Istanbul, a fact that the grand schemes of Hakluyt - and Harvey - simply do not realise. In writing Lenten Stuffe Nashe is revealing the reality of England in ways that have escaped the attention of those who think they are writing about the nation, but who actually miss what is all around them, foolishly thinking that they have to move away from their homeland in order to understand it, whereas they only have to open their eyes. His description of his journey to Great Yarmouth tells readers more about what matters to them than they will find in the pages of The Principall Navigations - or indeed, Pierce Supererogation - because it uncovers and makes available what really sustains the English, herring rather than saffron, the voyages of local fishing fleets rather than dangerous and often pointless overseas travel. Lenten Stuffe takes what might seem a perverse confrontational position. Nevertheless, for all its comic bluster and multiple layers of irony, it is a deeply serious work that thinks about the nation and the movement that is required to understand as well as sustain it. Many writers were eager to establish and represent exactly what England was and how it should be conceived, as it became possible to survey, quantify and chart the nation, establish its boundaries and compare it to its neighbours, rivals and distant outposts. The urgency became more apparent in the 1590s as the Tudor dynasty neared its end and the English wanted to know who they were and where they lived. 36 [T]he red herring flyes best when his wings are dry : throughout Belgia, high Germanie, Fraunce, Spaine, and Italy hee flyes, and vp into Greece and Africa, South and Sothwest, Estrich-like, walkes his stations, and the Sepulcher Palmers or Pilgrims, because hee is so portable, fill their Scrips with them, yea, no dispraise to the bloud of the Ottomans, the Nabuchedonesor of Constantinople and Giantly Nashe has produced a humorous reminder of what people needed to know and what was often left out of what he saw as grandiose and dangerously deluded visions of imperial expansion. Later on in Lenten Stuffe, Nashe conjures a fantastic vision of the red herring becoming a dried flying fish travelling as far as the limits of the Old World: 36 See, in particular, Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1992); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), ch. 1. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 53 Antaeus, that neuer yawneth nor neezeth but he afrighteth the whole earth, gormandizing, muncheth him vp for his imperiall dainties (192). The style of the sentence becomes ever more inflated as the herring proceeds on his epic journey, a parody of the movements of the bravest English explorers. A key point is that travel requires sustenance, and so cannot be undertaken without preserved food, almost invariably dried. Here, however, the herring’s progress is represented as if it were an end in itself. Nashe is reminding readers that they must not lose sight of what they have at home, its importance and how what seems more important is invariably nourished by something that is easy to overlook. Too much food makes those who overindulge sick, even if their leavings are as valuable as those of Homer or Nashe. Nevertheless, everyone needs to be sustained in leaner times by Lenten stuff, which is why the Yarmouth fleets are so much more valuable than their more celebrated counterparts. A NDREW H ADFIELD 54 Works Cited Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Beier, A.L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640. London: Methuen, 1985. Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. Stroud: Sutton, 1992. Brayshay, Mark. “Royal Post-Horse Routes in England and Wales: The evolution of the network in the later-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century.” Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991), 373-89. --and Philip Harrison and Brian Chalkley. “Knowledge, Nationhood and Governance: The speed of the Royal Post in early-modern England.” Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998), 265-88. Crofts, J. Packhorse, Wagon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications Under the Tudors and Stuarts. London: Routledge, 1967. Day, Matthew. “Hakluyt, Harvey, Nashe: The Material Text and Early Modern Nationalism.” Studies in Philology 104 (2007), 281-305. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Hadfield, Andrew. “Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins.” Irish Historical Studies 112 (1993), 390-408. ---. “Spenser, Drayton and the Question of Britain.” Review of English Studies. NS, 51 (2000), 599-616. ---, ed. Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: An Anthology of Travel and Colonial Writing, 1550-1650. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. 8 vols. London: Everyman, 1907. Harvey, Gabriel. Pierces Supererogation or A New Prayse of the Old Ass: A Preparatiue to Certaine Larger Discourses, Intituled Nashes s. Fame. London, 1593. ---. Fovr Letters and certaine sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene (1592). Ed. G.B. Harrison. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1966, 13. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1992. Howard, Clare. English Travellers of the Renaissance. London: John Lane, 1914. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Jowitt, Claire, ed. Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Kamps, Ivo and Jyotsna Singh. Travel Knowledge: European”‘Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest.” Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Kupperman, Karen Ordhal. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984. Mobility in the Works of Thomas Nashe 55 Labarge, Margaret Wade. Medieval Travellers: The Rich and Restless. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982. Linton, Joan Pong. The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. McRae, Andrew. Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Mancall, Peter. Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. ---, ed. Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A. D. 500-1600. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. Nicholl, Charles. A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe. London: Routledge, 1984. Ohler, Norbert. The Medieval Traveller. Trans. Caroline Hillier. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1989. Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Rapple, Rory. “Sir Humphrey Gilbert.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Riggs, David. Ben Jonson: A Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Rowse, A.L. Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society. London: Cape, 1941. Sloan, Kim. A New World: England’s First View of America. London: The British Museum Press, 2007. Sonnino, Lee A. A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric. London: Routledge, 1968. Stern, Virginia F. Gabriel Harvey: A Study of his Life, Marginalia, and Library. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Stoye, John. English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667. rev. ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Thirsk, Joan. “The Farming Regions of England.” Joan Thirsk, ed. The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume IV, 1500-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967, 1- 112. Trim, D.J.B. “The Art of War: Martial poetics from Henry Howard to Philip Sidney.” Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 587-605. Woodhead, Christine. “William Harborne.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. T OBIAS D ÖRING Magic and Mobility: Theatrical Travels in Marlowe and Shakespeare 1. Introduction: Mobility and Modernity “When shall we three meet again? ” (Macbeth, 1.1.1) 1 Whatever else this famous opening line of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth may mean or do, it certainly suggests at once that the three witches who are meeting here must have a very busy schedule. To spectators, still dazzled by the theatrical effect of thunder and lightning at the start, the conversation of the hurried figures they observe on stage is likely to appear as one occasion among many, perhaps regular, encounters when these three come together so as to compare notes, promote exchange or possibly decide upon some course of action - rather like busy CEOs checking their diaries or, indeed, busy academics fixing the date for the next conference, amidst the hurly-burly of their demanding professional lives. And true enough, when this next conference eventually takes place and the three sisters meet again, as we observe a couple of scenes later, what they talk about gives ample evidence of their professional involvement in the business of travel, trade and transport. “Where hast thou been, sister? ” (1.3.1) the question goes, to which they must all reply so as to reveal their tours and routes. The First Witch in particular recounts a series of activities - about the sailor’s wife she visited, whose husband captained a ship to Aleppo, where she now intends to sail - which clearly show her strong engagement with the culture of contemporary seafaring and maritime adventure. Sailing, especially sailing in sieves, used to be a common notion of witch-lore; in fact, this was one of the accusations brought against the Scottish witches whom King James personally interrogated. 2 1 All Shakespeare texts are cited according to The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). Though meeting on the Scottish heath, that is to say, the witches in Macbeth are by no means landlocked figures. On the contrary, we realize that they operate in and through the modes of voyaging, as suggested in their chant: “The weird sisters hand in hand,/ Posters of the sea and land,/ Thus do go about, about” (1.3.30-32). The term posters, by which they like to call themselves, is glossed as “swift 2 See Macbeth. The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 126. T OBIAS D ÖRING 58 travellers” 3 and thus confirms their involvement in the culture of travel. “They can rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire, either vpon Sea or land,” as King James writes of witches in his Daemonologie, 4 It is for two reasons that I begin with this example and would like to pursue its implications in the course of this essay. Firstly, Shakespeare’s Scottish witches serve as a manifestation of the supernatural, magic or demonic stuff that so much of early modern theatre is made of and that forms a regular or, at any rate, quite popular feature of many plays, promising strong stage effects, spectacular action and commercial success. specifying their routine interference in essential modes of transport. Whatever else they come to represent or mean, therefore, the witches in Macbeth should first of all be seen as figures of mobility. 5 Yet, in addition to these reasons, magic may have been so popular and pervasive in the early modern playhouse because it also pointed to the magic of the theatre which I propose to look at in more detail in relation to the history and culture of mobility. For secondly, Shakespeare’s witches also help, I think, to question the general assumption, often made tacitly but sometimes openly expressed, that mobility functions as a marker of modernity. This view, arguably based on Giddens’ concepts of modernity and self-identity, 6 3 Norton Shakespeare, 2567. seems to underlie many present-day engagements with the dynamics of global trade or travel, migration or displacement: that these are recent, new, or at least specifically modern processes that set off the present age of intensified exchange and dynamism against some older, static and pre-modern period where people found themselves arrested in archaic and immobilizing structures. This view proceeds on the assumption that there is a close connection between mobility, perspective and identity which appears to be an elementary signature of modernity and modernization. Consequently, to break free of any given station is a means to mobilize and, in this way, to modernize society - a narrative of progress by mobility advancement which we should see with skepticism. Instead, the challenge is to historicize - hence question - any such pervading notions, through the various contributions to this volume, by in- 4 King James, Daemonologie [1597], facsimile reprint (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1966), 46. 5 For explorations of magic and magicians on the early modern stage, see Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador, “The Power of Magic: From Endimion to The Tempest,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 1-13; Andreas Höfele, “Wissen und Macht. Der Gelehrte als Magier im Drama der Shakespearezeit,” Poetica 26 (1994): 88-104; Tobias Döring, “Magic, Necromancy, and Performance: Uses of Renaissance Knowledge in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Magic, Science, Technology and Literature, eds. Jarmila Mildorf, Hans Ulrich Seeber, Martin Windisch (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006), 39-56. 6 Which are, as a matter of fact, a lot more complex than often recounted and do not allow for any simplistic equation of modernity and mobility; see e.g. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) or Modernity and Self- Identity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991). Magic and Mobility 59 vestigating practices and products of mobility across time and against the teleological accounts which would make us believe in the essential newness of the phenomenon we study. This is what the witches warn against. The “weird” or “wayward” sisters in Macbeth, as the Old English connections of their designation as the three “fates” suggest, certainly reach back into the distant past and represent an old, archaic cultural frame. On the other hand, everything they actually say and do throughout this play, initiating its various plots of violent upward mobility, puts them into the topical framework of voyaging and wide-ranging travel. As figures of mobility, then, these witches are neither new nor old but simply all-pervasive. Mobility studies, this example may suggest, are essentially about “what medieval theologians called contingentia, the sense that the world as we know it is not necessary: the point is not only that the world will pass away, but also that it could all have been otherwise.” 7 to be fully convincing, mobility studies also need to account for the intense illusion that mobility in one particular direction or another is predestined. They need to account as well for the fact that cultures are experienced again and again - in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence - not as contingent at all but as fixed, inevitable, and strangely enduring. This is how Stephen Greenblatt summarizes the agenda that we face. In a joint project with some other cultural analysts, established as a working group at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, he published in 2010 what he called “a manifesto” on the principles of cultural mobility and the central issues which we, as scholars or investigators, must address in our efforts to describe, let alone to theorize, longstanding processes of transfer, mutual exchange and interaction. These constantly defy all systematic accounts that have been attempted, by virtue of their randomness, pervasiveness and ultimate contingency - or, as we might also put it, by virtue of the general hurly-burly, i.e. the state of our world as essentially so tumultuous, mutable and ever-changing that fair and foul or win or loss can no longer be distinguished. This is the state of general mobility-as-contingency that we must face even if it is often denied; as Greenblatt writes, 8 Where nothing endures, we may perhaps add, the notion of endurance turns out to be even stronger. In response to such a diagnosis, Greenblatt demands that we turn to what he calls the “microhistories of ‘displaced’ things and persons,” 9 7 Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Cultural Mobility. A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 16. case studies which try to keep track of one such particular item and trace its movements through all its complex transhistorical and transcultural manifestations. This 8 Ibid. 9 Greenblatt 17. T OBIAS D ÖRING 60 is what the various chapters in his volume want to offer. His own chapter entitled “Theatrical Mobility,” however, seems to disappoint on this account. Largely a report about his efforts to produce a new, collaborative and contemporary version of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio and about its subsequent rewriting and staging by a Japanese director, his chapter is a long and slightly self-indulgent way of arguing that the phenomenon of cultural mobility is nothing but “misunderstanding” 10 If mobility were constitutive of modernity, we should be able to identify specific practices and institutions which in early modern England first began to work towards significant increases in the culture of mobility and the mobility of culture. As just indicated, I suspect that this would turn out to be difficult, since social practices like trade or travel were not new at all but continued what had long been happening before the sixteenth century. However, one new institution certainly rose to prominence and power in this period and soon functioned as a model also of a greater social sphere and, in some cases, of the world at large: the theatre. The professional London playhouses, I suggest, present as well as represent both social mobility and cultural exchange. As the editors of a recent study argue, early modern theatre is remarkable “both in the ways it represented transnational exchanges and in the ways that it enacted them.” - a bleak conclusion to a tale of loss. Yet its title “Theatrical Mobility” still raises a programmatic challenge and has given me a strong cue for my own attempt to explore some ways in which mobility studies might be intertwined with, and profit from, theatre studies and, in particular, from early modern drama. 11 It did so through engaging with all three “mechanisms of exchange” identified by Nicholson and Henke, 12 This, then, is the hypothesis which I would like to test by way of discussing two short excerpts from two canonical plays. I have chosen these examples precisely because such well-known and widely circulating texts may i.e. trade, diplomacy and travel, not just through the conditions of production by constantly touring companies of players across geographical and social borders but also through the cultural effects of their reception: playhouses offered sites for spectators from different social spheres to meet and be confronted with stage spectacles where often such encounters are played out; they frequently imagine foreign locales or distant places and stage the consequences of maritime experience, exploration, spatial moves or New World travels which may, in the sense suggested earlier, indeed be seen as signatures of modernity. The playhouse, in short, may well be the thing by which we catch, or at the least observe, the contingencies of mobility. 10 Greenblatt 95. 11 Robert Henke, Eric Nicholson, eds., Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1. 12 Henke/ Nicholson 6. Magic and Mobility 61 have, I hope, some diagnostic power and possibly allow for tentative conclusions. In particular, what I am interested in are passages and plays in which the theatre observes itself and stages its own mediality and cultural force by staging scenes of magic and witchcraft. Whenever onstage conjuring takes place, whenever supernatural practices or agents are presented so as to transform reality, bewitch their audience or perform some other magic spectacle, I would like to suggest that the theatre here mobilizes its own powers of performance and thus explores the working of its very art. If, as Greenblatt argues, the point of mobility studies is to show that the world we know is never necessary but could also have been otherwise, then the playhouse seems to be a useful cultural space to rehearse such an awareness of contingency. And if the theatre is thus engaged in training spectators in the transformability of their worldly frame, then magic and mobility converge. The following section sets out, on the basis of two short, concrete examples, to develop critical readings which may support, or perhaps qualify, this argument, before venturing towards some tentative conclusions in the final part. 2. Othello and Doctor Faustus: Metatheatrical Magic In the first act of Shakespeare’s Othello, the titular hero is summoned to the senate to defend himself against the accusation that he has bewitched the daughter of a rich Venetian family to become his wife. In his reply to this charge, he tells his life story of travel and adventure: Her father loved me, oft invited me, Still questioned me the story of my life From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes That I have passed. I ran it through even from my boyish days To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it, Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence, And portance in my traveller’s history, Wherein of antres vast and desert idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak. Such was my process, And of the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grown beneath their shoulders. These things to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline […]. […] T OBIAS D ÖRING 62 My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of kisses. She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange, ‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished That heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake. She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used. (Othello, 1.3.127-168) In this celebrated speech, a long-distance traveller confronts an audience of sceptic listeners who eventually find themselves transfixed by his adventures. Accused of witchcraft and illicit practices in winning his young wife, he now recounts his travelling with as much vivid detail to his judges, who form his present audience, as he previously used to tell the same story to the young woman and her father, who formed his first audience - and in so doing, crucially, the traveller and story-teller now achieves the same effect his tale had then: he charms his listeners. “I think this tale would win my daughter, too” (1.3.170), the Duke replies as soon as the tale has ended. Thus testifying to the power of Othello’s narrative performance, the Duke is speaking not just for his daughter but also for himself, and not just for himself but also for the entire audience of the senate, and not just for the senate, but also for us, the actual audience in the playhouse witnessing how this onstage audience must witness and experience the efficacy of words. Three points are relevant for us in this example. First of all, Othello clearly figures here as a representative of cultural mobility and a verbal vehicle of popular travelogues, both in their Renaissance versions as collected in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and in their earlier, medieval manifestations with Mandeville’s Travels, several details of which are alluded to throughout this speech. 13 13 See John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). The theatre, we note, constitutes a platform to present and promote contemporary as well as conventional - indeed rather clichéd - travel discourse. In Othello’s case, however, this is not simply a matter of verbal citation but also of display and physical encounter: as “the moor,” Othello embodies the foreignness and stages the experience of otherness which, to the Venetians in the diegesis of the play just as to the Londoners of Shakespeare’s early audience, occur as the result of travel and migration. Such encounters and experiences are, in fact, frequently a central matter of the playhouse where their effects were often shown and seen as part of early Magic and Mobility 63 modern entertainment culture with its commercial displays of monstrosities. 14 Secondly, Othello’s senate speech also demonstrates how to do things with words: his words have power, as we see, to move their audience, both then and now, and make the world a different place in making Desdemona just as the Duke or indeed all members of this audience, including ourselves, change in outlook, attitude, awareness and behaviour. This is the magical effect of language in performance which Brabantio describes as “witchcraft” and which constitutes, I would suggest, a metatheatrical element: the onstage effect of Othello’s narrative shows and proves what miracles the stage can work. Theatre here draws attention to its own perlocutionary force - to borrow John Searle’s salient term - to wield power over others. “Were I in England now,” Shakespeare’s Trinculo exclaims upon discovering a strange and fascinating creature on the foreign island of The Tempest (2.2.26-29), “not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man.” Whether monstrous or alluring, effects and products of mobility are clearly used to sell domestically as a great attraction. This is relevant because, thirdly, the senate scene also assigns a specific model of behaviour to theatrical spectators, a model which, significantly, works against the practice of mobility. Othello’s audience is ‘riveted’ or ‘captivated,’ we could say, by the breathtaking adventures he recounts; that is to say, in listening to this story of mobility the listeners in fact lose their own mobility. The degree of their own fascination translates into physical arrest and may again, in this way, offer us a model of what happens in the playhouse. However much the theatre may serve to publicize the social consequences of long-distance trade and travel and so celebrate the culture of mobility in what it shows on stage, the early modern playhouse also formed an institution of spatial confinement and physical arrest. To be sure, the architecture of the public playhouses was a lot less rigid in disciplining spectators or proscribing their bodily movements than later proscenium arch theatres. Still, they certainly confined and kept people within a strictly measured space - in contrast to the best-known earlier forms of public play-acting such as late medieval miracle or mystery plays, which were performed, promenade-style, in the open. Comparatively speaking, then, the social space of purpose-built theatres in Shakespeare’s London was a great deal more confining so that possibilities for people to move around were strongly regulated and restricted. Yet, as the example of Othello shows, within this confined space of viewing and enactment, the playhouse confronts people verbally and visually with foreign narratives and sights and so stimulates spectators often to imagine distant worlds not actually present. The experience of travel 14 See Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (London, New York: Palgrave, 2002). T OBIAS D ÖRING 64 that a figure like Othello recounts as well as represents is therefore predicated on the experience of arrest for listeners and viewers: imaginative investments in mobility are actually paid for by confinement. Let us compare this analysis to the following travel narrative from a somewhat earlier tragedy: Chorus: Learned Faustus, to find the secrets of astronomy Graven in the book of Jove’s high firmament, Did mount him up to scale Olympus’ top Where, sitting in a chariot burning bright, Drawn by the strength of yoked dragons’ necks, He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars, The tropics, zones, and quarters of the sky, From the bright circle of the horned moon Even to the height of Primum Mobile; And, whirling round with this circumference, Within the concave compass of the pole, From east to west his dragons swiftly glide And in eight days did bring him home again. Not long he stayed within his quiet house To rest his bones after his weary toil, But new exploits do hale him out again, And, mounted then upon a dragon’s back, That with his wings did part the subtle air, He now is gone to prove cosmography, […]. (Chorus 3.0, B-text) 15 This passage from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus - the quotation follows the socalled B-text of the play; in the A-text the speech is shorter and assigned to Wagner - offers an interesting comparison, for our purposes, to Othello’s travelogue. The “greatest of all Elizabethan plays of travel,” as Peter Holland has described it, 16 15 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: Norton, 2005), 81. The Tragicall Historie of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus is entirely structured on the pattern of peregrinatio vitae, i.e. the life-as-journey trope, which turns the best part of the play into a series of stops or stations - at the Vatican, at the Emperor’s court, at the Duke’s of Vanholt and so on - all part of the larger journey on which the titular hero has embarked. From the confinement of his study, where we first meet Faustus and where the first third of the play is set, the tragedy continuously widens its horizon and shifts its theatrical setting to a number of locales in order to present a veritable tour 16 Peter Holland, “‘Travelling Hopefully’: the Dramatic Form of Journeying in the English Renaissance Drama,” Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 161. Magic and Mobility 65 of Europe. As Faustus mentions in one of his speeches, 17 he has visited the cities of Trier, Paris, Naples, Venice and Padua before eventually arriving at Rome; in this way, he presents himself as a wandering scholar and gentleman on a grand tour, which he has booked by giving his soul to the devil. Yet what the Chorus recounts in the passage cited goes well beyond even the known geography of Europe to include truly cosmic dimensions: Faustus’s journey onto Olympus’ top, with the aim to penetrate the secrets of astronomy, is to provide the answer to his pressing questions by which he earlier urged Mephistopheles to dispute with him the spheres, the moon and the celestial bodies. 18 Mount Olympus is to offer him a useful point of observation for these scientific interests, and his journey therefore is to realize the same insatiable - and morally doubtful - desire for always greater knowledge, which King James described in his Daemonologie as the ruinous path to magic: “so mounting from degree to degree, vpon the slipperie and vncertaine scale of curiositie; they are at last enticed, that where lawfull artes or sciences failes, to satisfie their restles minds, even to seeke to that black and vnlawfull science of Magie.” 19 Unlike Othello’s journey, then, which leads him from a foreign sphere of wonders and adventures into the familiar world of urban and domestic life in Venice, where he may charm us with his tale, Faustus’ journey leads the other way, from the small and familiar world of academic study into ever larger, greater, darker and more dangerous spheres, beyond the limits of the lawful, right up to the Primum Mobile. His travelling performs his peculiar quality as “overreacher” - to use Levin’s classic term 20 Comparing these two passages, we should also note some other contrasts, not least in their communicative situations: whereas Othello’s speech is in character and part of a scene, the report of Faustus’ travels is rendered ad spectatores by a Chorus. Yet in one respect they are also alike: in both cases, no actual movement is enacted on the stage, all mobility is merely rendered as a narrative. We simply hear about the journeys of these tragic heroes but do not see them doing what is told. For reasons easily appreciated, the theatre does not allow for any witnessing of actual journeys. Mobility, in Doctor Faustus, in Othello and quite possibly in all the other relevant plays, is almost exclusively part of the diegesis, not the mimesis, of the stage: a matter of telling rather than showing. What does this suggest for our general interest? - and thus also involves an admonitory tale, in King James’ sense, against the dangers of mobility. Whereas Othello manages to domesticate cultural mobility, Faustus’ restlessness is risk. 17 Marlowe 82. 18 Marlowe 76. 19 King James 10. 20 Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1952). T OBIAS D ÖRING 66 I think this observation points us to a fundamental paradox in the economy of theatrical mobility. Even though playhouses, as has been argued, epitomize, promote and publicize early modern mobility, we must reiterate the point that audiences are in fact immobilized during performance and willingly suspend their own physical motion in order to imagine it all the more readily on stage. Movement predominately takes place in the diegesis of the travel stories that figures like Faustus or Othello have to tell, whereas the actual mimesis of performance confines all motion just to words. This is a central and, I would argue, telling problem of theatrical mobility. No matter how many travellers and overreachers may be staged, how breathtaking their escapes and adventures or how much inspiration or dramatic substance playwrights may have gained from the kind of travelogues or popular pamphlets Shakespeare and Marlowe would have drawn on - when it comes to stage enactment, all this must somehow be confined to the strictly measured platform of the playhouse, all crammed into the famous “wooden O,” presented so as to suggest the world at large. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts The perilous ocean parts asunder. (Henry V, 0.19-22) Pleas, instructions and imperatives like this one - “suppose,” “imagine,” “think” -, constantly repeated by the Chorus of Shakespeare’s Henry V, remind us not just of the awkwardness in trying to stage ocean voyages and travels but also of the high imaginative investment on the part of theatre spectators, which is clearly necessary so as to make theatrical mobility work. We see at this point how the very medium of theatre is predicated on the radical contingency which Greenblatt, as quoted earlier, identified at the heart of cultural mobility: the Chorus in Henry V powerfully conveys to us the sense that it could all be otherwise. It is for this reason that classically-minded playwrights such as Ben Jonson had an easy time to criticize “the ill customs of the age” by ridiculing plays like Henry V which desperately grapple with the paradox of theatrical mobility. The prologue to Every Man in His Humour instead promises a play where no such offence against reason and decorum is to be expected and where no chorus “wafts” us “o’er the seas.” 21 21 Every Man in His Humour, Prologue, l. 13. The Mermaid Series Ben Jonson, eds. Brinsley Nicholson and C.H. Herford (London: T. Fisher Unwin; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons [no year]), 5. And yet, there is a sense in which the Shakespearean chorus mocked here advertises the discrepancies between the mobility of stage figures and the immobility of spectators almost defiantly - even to the point of promising us to provide transport across the Magic and Mobility 67 sea without causing sea sickness: 22 This is also manifest in the two examples just considered. In the case of Othello’s senate speech, we already noted the metatheatrical twist by which the effect of his narrative performance replicates and highlights the transfixing power of theatrical performance. In the case of Faustus, too, such elements are unmistakable. When we follow his itinerary through the play, from the Vatican to the Emperor’s court to the Duke’s of Vanholt and so on, in each place staging some performance of his magic art, his travelling might well appear to us as a mise en scène - or indeed mise en abyme - of the early modern touring companies that presented Marlowe’s tragedy to different audiences, not just within England but, in all likelihood, also on the continent and so quite possibly retracing the same itinerary - Trier, Paris, Naples, Venice and so on - which Faustus specifies himself. In this way, the fictional moves and tours of the stage magician are actually undertaken - literalized, as it were - by the early modern players and their entertainment industry. Thus, the magical and the theatrical performance of mobility converge. in actual fact, the Chorus knows that we know that we never move. Theatrical mobility therefore involves selfreflexive engagements with the very medium and practice of the theatre to which all spectators submit. What is more, the Chorus narrative also describes Faustus’ means of transport in ways which make his magic flights contingent on the helpful figure of a dragon who either pulls the chariot or spreads its wings in order to fulfill the master’s longing for mobility. This dragon, then, serves rather the same function that is also served by Mephistopheles in making Faustus’ magic happen and in performing everything that he commands. It is striking to observe how many of the conjurers and magi we encounter on the early modern stage have such personal assistants to carry out their words and make things happen (Faustus has his Mephistopheles, just as Oberon his Puck or Prospero his Ariel), as if their conjuring power cannot work just through and by itself but needs the intervention of such crucial go-betweens. But it is even more striking to realize that these magic helpmates are not just figures of intense mobility - swift posters, travellers or merry wanderers of the night who may easily fetch dew from the Bermudas or put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes - but that they are also always figures that produce theatrical effects. For this is how we witness these mobility assistants to achieve their greatest feats: in performing just the kind of spectacles that the playhouse promises its patrons. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s involvement is with lovers’ eyes and their faculty of seeing and so 22 “There is the playhouse now, there must you sit,/ And thence to France shall we convey you safe,/ And bring you back, charming the narrow seas/ To give you gentle pass - for if we may/ We’ll not offend one stomach with our play.” Henry V, Chorus 2.0.36- 40. T OBIAS D ÖRING 68 involves also the faults or faculties of actual theatre spectators; in The Tempest, Ariel’s major task is, as we see right at the outset of the play, to stage the tempest and spectacular shipwreck, which are soon revealed to be the work of Prospero’s “art” working through his servant. And Mephistopheles appears throughout Marlowe’s tragedy like a true master of revels organizing, supervising and producing all the various shows - from the Seven Deadly Sins to Helen of Troy - that delight his master’s mind just as they delight us in the theatre. So, if these mobile servants of the most famous stage magicians routinely turn out to be stage performers and chief theatrical producers, then theatrical mobility is predicated on metatheatrical magic. Where does this lead us in our enquiry? 3. The Paradox of Theatrical Mobility Before coming to a tentative conclusion, I would like to try and summarize the sketchy and somewhat impressionistic discussion of these short dramatic excerpts into four arguments or hypotheses which should, I hope, suggest directions for future and more comprehensive research in theatrical mobility. Firstly, the early modern playhouse is an institution to explore the culture of mobility, precisely by immobilizing spectators, and to make them witness its effects. Offering them “infinite riches in a little room,” in the memorable phrase of Marlowe’s Barabas, 23 Secondly, the paradox by which theatrical travels constitute themselves is principally staged through acts of magic and their metatheatricality, i.e. onstage performances of conjuring by which the theatre displays its own effects and explores the powers of its medium while also reflecting on the predicament between “stillness and motion” - in the terms of P.A. Skantze the theatre presents as well as represents both the impact and the outcome of geographical and cultural movements across boundaries and through space, even though it can never actually show mobility in progress; instead, it rather displays cultural or social consequences that result from these intense activities of transport. This may be the reason why a play like The Tempest, often seen and read in the context of contemporary voyaging and colonial expansion, is in fact one of Shakespeare’s spatially most confined and static dramas, unusually adhering to the classic unities of space and time and not suggesting, as in so many other cases of Shakespearean drama, wide-ranging travels as part of the performance. Theatrical mobility, this goes to show, lies mainly in the mind of spectators. 24 23 The Jew of Malta, 1.1.37, Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, eds. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 251. - that spectators must face. Whenever travels are performed, we need to activate 24 P.A. Skantze, Stillness and Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre (London/ New York: Routledge, 2003). Magic and Mobility 69 our own powers of imagination so as to make the stage show work. Whenever magic is performed, we also need to question the prevailing notions of the real so as to see how early modern theatre here ventures into border zones of make-believe which underwrite its very practice. Indeed, both travelling and conjuring also constitute a risk for all involved, as neither act can ever be controlled with confidence nor always be predicted in its outcome. 25 Any voyage may result in shipwreck, just as any act of onstage magic may lead to unwanted results - as in the famous anecdote about a Faustus performance in Exeter which, according to a contemporary report, was broken off in horror when the players realized with dismay that all of a sudden one devil too many had appeared on stage. 26 Thirdly, the early modern theatre, Henke and Nicholson argue, This openness and unpredictability is a constitutive risk in all forms of mobility just as in live performance. 27 was capable of generating “contact zones” and of communicating across boundaries of regions, classes, cultures. I take this as another indication of the risks involved in theatrical mobility, for contact zones - according to M.L. Pratt’s own seminal account when she first coined this potent concept 28 - are notoriously difficult to manage and control. The issue here is not just how to enter but also how to exit contact zones and, especially, how to emerge from them unscathed. This question is raised, for instance, by Faustus when he is planning his grand tour and would also like to undertake a short excursion to hell: “O, might I see hell and return again safe; how happy were I then.” 29 Fourthly, Johannes Fabian once introduced a useful distinction by establishing the difference between travel to and travel from and suggesting a historical shift in paradigm. As it happens, he will miss his return trip and, for all we know, remain there in the end. This goes to show, as argued earlier, that mobility rests on contingency and does not easily allow for predetermined, calculated or predestined routes. 30 25 For an expanded discussion of this point, see my article “All the World’s the Sea: Shakespearean Passages,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 148 (2012): 11-30. In the old practice of pilgrimage, he argued, “travel had been to the centers of religion,” whereas in the modern period “secular travel was from the centers of learning and power to places where man was to find nothing but himself.” The difference therefore lies with the point of reference and authority to which the activity of travel is related in each case and from which it derives its meaning. In the early modern play- 26 Marlowe, Faustus 181. 27 Henke/ Nicholson 1. 28 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, New York: Routledge, 1992). 29 Marlowe, Faustus 80. 30 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), 6. T OBIAS D ÖRING 70 house, I would like to suggest, what the stage presents is always travel from, i.e. a given point of speculation and spectatorship, from which journeys may be undertaken and observed. Theatrical mobility, in this sense, means observed and observing mobility; it precisely gains its meaning by making the cultural consequences of travel subject to continued witnessing and questioning. To conclude, while I hesitate to subscribe to a teleological view and measure modernity by an increase in mobility, I think we may be justified to see crucial modernizing tendencies in some newly established institutions like the early modern playhouse which served to stage mobility and so enabled people to observe it and to reflect on its effects. As Greenblatt reminds us in his study, “in matters of culture, the local has always been irradiated, as it were, by the larger world.” 31 31 Greenblatt 4. Yet it may have needed more specific cultural media to register and represent these kinds of irradiations and thus to work also towards a better understanding of the local. After all, the first world atlas by Abraham Ortelius, as is well known, was entitled Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, just as the most famous London playhouse, as is equally well known, was called The Globe. Seen together, these two cultural media may ultimately show the uses of theatrical mobility: to redefine the local as a place where, despite the hurly-burly of contingency, we may eventually, like Shakespeare’s witches, actually meet again. Magic and Mobility 71 Works Cited Burnett, Mark Thornton. Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture. London, New York: Palgrave, 2002. Döring, Tobias. “Magic, Necromancy, and Performance: Uses of Renaissance Knowledge in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.” Magic, Science, Technology, and Literature. Eds. Jarmila Mildorf, Hans Ulrich Seeber, Martin Windisch. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006, 39-56. ---. “All the world’s the sea: Shakespearean passages.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 148 (2012), 11-30. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. ---. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. Cultural Mobility. A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. The Norton Shakespeare. Based on the Oxford Edition. New York: Norton, 1997. Henke, Robert, and Eric Nicholson, eds. Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Höfele, Andreas. “Wissen und Macht. Der Gelehrte als Magier im Drama der Shakespearezeit.“ Poetica 26 (1994). 88-104. Holland, Peter. “’Travelling Hopefully’: the Dramatic Form of Journeying in the English Renaissance Drama.” In: Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. Eds. Jean- Pierre Maquerlot, Michèle Willems. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 160-178. King James. Daemonologie [1597]. Facsimile reprint. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1966. Jonson, Ben. Every Man in His Humour. The Mermaid Series. Eds. Brinsley Nicholson, C.H. Herford. London: T. Fisher Unwin, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, no year. Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1952. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Eds. Frank Romany, Robert Lindsey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. ---. Doctor Faustus. Ed. David Scott Kastan. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2005. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London, New York: Routledge, 1992. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Ed. A.R. Braunmuller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Skantze, P.A. Stillness and Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre. London/ New York: Routledge, 2003. Tetzeli von Rosador, Kurt. “The Power of Magic: From Endimion to The Tempest.” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991). 1-13. H ASSAN M ELEHY The Mobility of Constancy: Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lipsius The Constant Sovereign Shortly before his death, Julius Caesar responds to the pleas of Metellus Cimber by refusing to pardon the latter’s brother, Publius Cimber. Others might be moved, says Caesar, “But I am constant as the Northerne Starre.” 1 Let me a little shew it, even in this: By putting these words in Caesar’s mouth, Shakespeare touches on one of the major topics of sixteenth-century moral and political thought, that of constancy, the key to the stability of the state against upheaval. In a play about crisis in the Roman polity, Shakespeare raises the question of whether the state can be stable at all, of whether, in facing the instability that its purpose requires it to overcome, it can do any more than provide an image of stability. Indeed, Julius Caesar suggests that state stability can only be achieved as a theatrical illusion, a function of the histrionics of the sovereign—and that hence it may be quickly lost when the illusion breaks. Caesar makes a point of saying that his constancy is at least as spectacular as substantive: That I was constant Cymber should be banish’d, And constant do remaine to keep him so. (3.1.71-73) Caesar indicates that the key to being constant is to show that he is constant, that he will maintain stability by putting on a show of sovereignty. Here as in other plays, Shakespeare deploys metatheatrical devices in order to present the maintenance of sovereignty as a matter of staging: he likens the state to a theater and the sovereign to an actor, frequently exploring the implications of this assimilation. His plays were also part of the apparatus of state pageantry—Julius Caesar, although its initial composition dates to 1599, is part of the system of public Romanized spectacle with which, beginning in 1604, James I marked his new kingship, presenting the durable or 1 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London: Arden, 1998), 3.1.60. I restore the First Folio spelling, relying on William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, ed. Neil Freeman (New York and London: Applause, 1998). H ASSAN M ELEHY 74 constant image of Rome as the model for the stable English state. 2 At the same time, as Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out, Shakespeare’s Roman plays examine English state power in its public theatrical function. 3 Moreover, the theme of constancy ties Julius Caesar to the first major neo-Stoic philosopher of the sixteenth century, Justus Lipsius, whose 1583 De constantia appeared in English translation in 1594, under the title Of Constancie, shortly before Shakespeare composed the play. In the same year, Lipsius’s other major work of political philosophy, the 1589 Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex, or simply the Politica, was also published in English. 4 Although scholarship has been all over the map on the question of Shakespeare’s interest in politics, recent research, most notably by Andrew Hadfield, makes the case that the Bard engaged seriously with the political thought of his time. 5 2 D.J. Hopkins, “Performance and Urban Space in Shakespeare’s Rome, or ‘S.P.Q.L.,’” in Bryan Reynolds and William N. West, eds., Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 35-38. Lipsius’s exposition in the Politica of the necessary connection between constancy and sovereignty suggests that his work is worth considering in relation to Julius Caesar. My purpose in this paper is not simply to offer insight into a likely Shakespearean source, but also to demonstrate that Julius Caesar constitutes, among other things, a detailed response to Lipsius, which, when seen as such, may add to current understandings of early modern thought on the relationship of constancy and politics. 3 Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983), 164-209. 4 On the fundamentally political character of De constantia, its close connection with the Politica, and the influence of Lipsian thought on early modern state formation, see Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 13-75. See also Halvard Leira, “Justus Lipsius, Political Humanism, and the Disciplining of 17th Century Statecraft,” Review of International Studies 34 (2008): 669-92. 5 In both Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), Hadfield relies on detailed and careful research to make a compelling case for particular political positions that the Bard at the very least addressed. Hadfield’s work comes in the wake of New Historicism and cultural materialism, which, as he notes, in contrast to understandings that hold Shakespeare to be either apolitical in his pursuit of more timeless matters or a conservative, “reversed [the latter] positive reading … and showed how his work was implicated in the history of class oppression, misogyny, racism and other ideologies of exploitation” (Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, vii). Stating that the New Historicist approach is “close to being exhausted,” Hadfield deems that it doesn’t fundamentally alter the reading of Shakespeare as a conservative and hence that “Shakespeare’s relationship to his literary, historical and cultural context remains the same” (vii). As I will show in this essay, textual evidence suggests Shakespeare’s active interest in political ideas and debates of his time—along with Hadfield, I aim to foreground the playwright’s relationship to early modern political culture. The Mobility of Constancy 75 The main problem with Caesar’s affirmation of constancy, one in a series of ironies concerning the term that runs throughout the play, is that moments later he dies: the constancy of the sovereign is quite shakeable if he is subject to death, as all human beings are. The irony is all the stronger since Caesar has claimed, following his declaration of constancy and apparently as a consequence of it, that his steadfastness makes him a god, beyond the power of human strength to move: to Cinna’s appeal he responds, “Hence: Wilt thou lift up Olympus? ” (3.1.74). But it is utterly clear when the conspirators stab him that he is not a god, and that his constancy is worth nothing—that despite his affirmation he cannot be constant because he is subject to death. This fact suggests that the only constancy available to him, and indeed to all human beings, is a matter of theatrics. But the very purpose of a constant sovereign is to assure the constancy of the state against instability. The play thereby raises the question of just what constancy is in connection with the continuity of a state. This is one of the central thematic questions of Julius Caesar, which it presents from the beginning: among the reasons that Cassius initially proposes for assassinating Caesar is that, in becoming a tyrant, he has altered the very nature of Roman virtue: … for Romans now Have Thewes, and Limbes, like to their Ancestors; But woe the while, our Fathers mindes are dead, And we are govern’d with our Mothers spirits, Our yoake, and sufferance, shew us Womanish. (1.3.90-94) Bound by the yoke of tyranny, Romans are turning into something other than Romans—that is, they are not constant. And the principal virtue they are losing, the strength that enables them to be constant, is their constancy. Servitude makes them “womanish,” the very opposite of constant. 6 The idea of constancy in Julius Caesar is highly charged: the constancy of the Roman Republic, which is that of its citizens, is at stake, the chief threat to it being a quality in himself that the sovereign presents as constancy. In order to restore this quality of the Republican state, the conspirators will commit an act that disturbs the constancy of the sovereign and hence of the state. The 6 Coppélia Kahn offers a commentary on this passage, signaling a mixture of Roman and English ethical principles: “Women—untrained in reason, dwellers in the domus excluded from the forum, and susceptible in the extreme to the affections—lack access to ‘constancy,’ meaning control over the affections, adherence to rationally-grounded principles like those of the republic, firmness. It is men who are firm, women who aren’t. Sir Thomas Elyot states that woman’s inconstancy is ‘a natural sickeness’…” Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 97. In The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), in which I begin observations on Shakespeare and Lipsius that I exend here, I address the relationship in Julius Caesar between femininity and constancy (230- 32). H ASSAN M ELEHY 76 play of course dramatizes the instability or inconstancy of the state in the form of the escalating civil wars that follow on the assassination of Caesar. Shakespeare is playing with a clash of different versions of constancy, and the result is that the play presents an examination of whether this virtue can be either effective as such or an effective property of the state. The meaning and applicability of constancy change throughout Julius Caesar—that is, the play stages constancy as mobile or inconstant. Hence it suggests that constancy might be a matter of theatrical appearance donned by actors and that this condition is the very inconstancy of constancy. Shakespeare’s metatheater offers the occasion to consider how this theatrical aspect of politics works. Constant Staging The conspirators also realize that if their plan is going to be successful, they must be constant, as Brutus states explicitly. Of the eight occurrences of the words constancy, constant, and constantly in Julius Caesar, this is the first. As he does the other times he uses it, Shakespeare gives the word a blatantly theatrical connotation, thereby introducing the theme of constancy as dramatic illusion. And as I will explain below, its context in Brutus’s speech in this scene also ties the word directly to Lipsius: Good Gentlemen, looke fresh and merrily, Let not our lookes put on our purposes, But beare it as our Roman Actors do, With untyr’d Spirits, and formall Constancie. (2.1.223-26) Constancy may well be understood as the most famously Roman virtue, 7 but here it stems less from the strength that enables one to remain steadfast in the face of adversity than from the skill in appearing to do so. Several commentators have examined the wonderful paradox of insisting on the constancy of actors. While actors have a stake in maintaining the consistency of the characters they are playing, their capacity to drop a character so as to play another entails an excess of inconstancy. 8 Geoffrey Miles points out that the expression “formal constancy” implies a theatrical quality, the disposition of actors who maintain the outer form of constancy. 9 7 Geoffrey Miles explains that constancy “was for Shakespeare and his contemporaries perhaps the quintessential Roman virtue.” Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 1. He also signals the pun of “untyr’d,” meaning both “steadfastly withstanding adversity” and “unat- 8 Goldberg, 164-76; Miles, 123-48. 9 Miles, 123. The Mobility of Constancy 77 tired.” 10 This use is entirely in keeping with Caesar’s own just before his death. But it runs exactly contrary to Lipsius’s understanding of constancy, in a way that goes well beyond previous assessments of the largely undefined notion of the Dutch philosopher’s ‘influence’ on Shakespeare. In several places in Julius Caesar and other plays by Shakespeare, there is an ironic allusion to the 1594 English version of Lipsius, Although actors are by definition attired when playing their roles, their spirits are not, since the latter are the source of strength in maintaining consistency of character. Of course, Brutus is asking his fellow conspirators to be constant in concealing their plans, but the use of the term raises the question of what the very important theme of constancy means over the course of the play, in addition to the consideration of the relationship of politics to theater and theatricality. 11 and furthermore a development of the concepts at work in the latter’s texts in a manner that may best be termed critical. In chapter 1 of book 1 of De constantia Lipsius introduces his dialogue as the result of his travels out of the Netherlands in order to escape civil war; the character named Lipsius is a younger version of the author, a naive student susceptible to the teachings of a wiser person. The latter is the character Langius (based on the historical Carolus Langius, or Karel de Langhe), whom Lipsius encounters in Vienna. Langius begins their dialogue by counseling, “Our mindes must be so confirmed and conformed that we may bee at rest in troubles, and have peace even in the midst of warre” [“firmandus ita formandusque hic animus, vt quies nobis in turbis sit & pax inter media arma”]. 12 10 Ibid., 124. Through Langius, Lipsius offers constancy as a defense for citizens against the emotional turmoil brought on by social and political instability: 11 Miles reports that the standard Roman sources on constancy in Shakespeare’s time were Cicero and Seneca, as well as “Continental ‘Neostoics’ like Justus Lipsius and Montaigne” (1). He provides a six-page exposition of Lipsius’s thought (70-75), but suggests no specific textual links with Shakespeare. He argues correctly that Shakespeare borrows from Montaigne’s refutations of stoicism, citing the long-accepted likelihood that Shakespeare knew John Florio and hence read the latter’s translation of the Essais before its 1603 publication (83-84). In The Northern Star: Shakespeare and the Theme of Constancy (Worcester: Blackthorn, 1989), Charles Wells quotes Lipsius in Stradling’s translation as the epigraph to the first section of his book (13), without commentary specifically tying the words to Shakespeare nor any further mention. Goldberg makes no reference to Lipsius. 12 Justus Lipsius, Of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (1594), eds. Rudolf Kirk and Clayton Morris Hall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1939), book 1, chapter 1, 72; this edition is a facsimile of the 1594 version, and I refer to it mainly because of my interest in examining close textual connections between Lipsius and Shakespeare. The Latin is from Lipsius, Concerning Constancy, ed. and trans. R.V. Young (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 1.1.18. This edition incorporates a tool indispensable to most early modernists, a facing text translation. Henceforth I cite both in the body of the text. H ASSAN M ELEHY 78 CONSTANCIE is a right and immoveable strength of the minde, neither lifted up, nor pressed downe with externall or casuall accidentes. By STRENGTH, I understande a steadfastnesse not from opinion, but from judgement and sound reason. (1.4.79—emphasis in text) [Constantium hic appello, rectvm et immotvm animi robvr, non elati externis avt fortvitis non depressi. Robur dixi, & intelligo firmitudinem insitam animo, non ab Opinione, sed a iudicio & recta Ratione. (26-28)] Caesar, despite his own affirmations, seems rather to bear a quality that Langius is careful to distinguish from constancy, obstinacy or “frowardness” [“Peruicaciam … sive Pertinacia”]: “Which is a certaine hardnesse of a stubberne mind, proceeding from pride or vaine glorie” (1.4.79) [“quae & ipsa obstinati animi robur est, sed a superbiae aut gloriae vento” (28)]. The difference between the two authors’ uses of the term constancy is hence evident, but they encounter each other, curiously enough, through Lipsius’s continuing elaboration of the word. In 1.8 Langius identifies the three greatest enemies of constancy as “DISSIMULATION, PIETIE, COM- MISERATION or PITTY” (88) [“Simulatio, Pietas, Miseratio” (40)]. By addressing it first, he accords dissimulation the greatest importance among the three. To illustrate the point that the larger public interests are not served by those who, during a calamity, put on a show of concern for the welfare of their homeland, while their own is solely at issue, he provides the example of one of the best-known Roman actors: And as it is recorded in histories of Polus a notable stage-player, that playing his part on the stage wherein it behooved him to expresse some great sorrow, he brought with him privily the bones of his dead son, & so the remembrance thereof caused him to fil the theatre with true teares indeed. (1.8.88) [Quod de Polo histrione nobili traditum est, cum Athenis fabulam actitaret in qua dolor repraesentandus, eum filij sui defuncti ossa et vrnam clam intulisse, & theatrum totum vero gemitu luctuque complesse … (40).] The actor engages in dissimulation by presenting emotions genuinely inspired by personal grief as something quite different, the grief of the character he is playing. Langius continues his instruction by comparing this actor to the person who would lament troubles to his country: “You play a Comedy, & under the person of your country, you bewail with tears your private miseries. One saith The whol world is a stage-play” (1.8.88-89) [Comoediam o boni lutuque, & velati persona patriae, priuata vestra damna veris et spirantibus lacrymis lugetis. Mundus vniversus exercet histrionem, ait Arbiter” (40)]” (The phrase in italics is a quotation that, in his original Latin, Lipsius attributes to Petronius [“Arbiter”], and its importance for Shakespeare is patent—I will return to it below.) So, in this conception, the citizen who pretends to be concerned for his country is really motivated by no care but for his own person and possessions, hence not contributing anything to and indeed detracting The Mobility of Constancy 79 from the public good. Shakespeare’s presentation of constancy as a matter of histrionics suggests that this virtue itself may function as a cover for selfinterest. Even if it doesn’t in the case of Brutus, Cassius, the first in the play to invoke constancy, makes it clear in his famous speech that he is advancing his own interest and acting under the sway of envy (1.2.90-160). Whereas for Lipsius constancy provides a remedy to using virtue as cover in this fashion, in Julius Caesar constancy itself becomes the disguise. After all, even Brutus, who is honorable to a fault, presents constancy as theatrical dissimulation: it turns out to be the ability to maintain dissimulation over time, against sometimes violent inclinations and the general human tendency to waver. Montaigne and the Inconstant Self A consideration of one of Shakespeare’s long-acknowledged sources, Michel de Montaigne, may illuminate the playwright’s treatment of constancy, in both Julius Caesar and other plays, as constantly on the brink of wavering. In a 1583 letter that he published in 1586, Lipsius expressed the highest admiration for Montaigne, characterizing him as a new Thales 13 —hence as the first true modern philosopher, in allusion to Aristotle, who regarded Thales the first Greek philosopher. 14 Though praising Lipsius in return, Montaigne was more measured: in a passage first published in 1588, from chapter 12 of book 2 of the Essais, “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond [Apologie de Raimond Sebond],” he refers to him as “the most sufficient and learned man now living [le plus sçavant homme qui nous reste]” 15 —not necessarily one who used his knowledge wisely. 16 13 Michel Magnien, “Montaigne et Juste Lipse: une double méprise? ,” in Juste Lipse (1549- 1606) en son temps. Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 1994, ed. Christian Mouchel (Paris: Champion, 1996), 425. Magnien has also written of the relationship between the two authors in “Aut sapiens, aut peregrinator: Montaigne vs. Lipse,” in The World of Justus Lipsius: A Contribution Toward His Intellectual Biography, ed. Marc Laureys, Christoph Bräunl, Silvan Mertens, and Reimar Seibert-Kemp (Rome: Institut Historique de Belge à Rome, 1998), 209-32, as well as in “Trois lettres de Juste Lipse à Montaigne (1587 [? ]- 1589),” Montaigne Studies 16 (2004): 103-11. Montaigne was of course fascinated with the idea of constancy, or rather the inevitability of inconstancy: it is a major theme of the Essais and also the occasion for the title of two chapters of his book, “De la 14 Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), vol. 2, 983b. 15 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Lord Michael of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London: E. Blount, 1603), BNF digital edition, 2.12.336; Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (1580, 1588, 1595) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 2.12.578. I refer to the 1603 Florio translation because one of my points in this essay is to examine close textual connections with Shakespeare, who was familiar with it; I add indications of the three textual layers. I will henceforth cite both these editions in the body of the text. 16 Magnien 1998, 211. H ASSAN M ELEHY 80 constance [Of Constancie]” (1.12) and “De l’inconstance de nos actions [Of the Inconstancie of Our Actions]” (2.1). Indeed, both Paul J. Smith and Michel Magnien, 17 in addition to several other scholars, affirm the likelihood that Lipsius’s turn from philology to philosophy, which resulted in first De constantia and then the Politica, was occasioned by his reading of Montaigne. Magnien has written about their correspondence, which probably took place between 1587 and 1589, and which by Lipsius’s account was quite extensive. 18 From this exchange only three letters survive, all by Lipsius, which Magnien reproduces in Latin and translates into French. 19 In “Of the Inconstancie of Our Actions,” Montaigne provides a series of observations justifying his view that constancy is the last thing one should expect from most people. Already in the A layer of 1580 and 1582 he is presenting a challenge to the ideas that Lipsius will pursue: “There is nothing I so hardly beleeve to be in man, as constancy, and nothing so easy to be found in him, as inconstancy” (2.1.193) [“Je croy des hommes plus mal aiséement la constance, que tout autre chose, et rien plus aiséement que l’inconstance” (332)]. Although Montaigne does not quite rule out the effectiveness of constancy, he submits that natural human tendencies run in just the opposite direction: “Our ordinarie maner is to follow the inclination of our appetite, this way and that way, on the left, and on the right hand, upward and downward, according as the wind of occasions doth transport us” (2.1.194) [“Nostre façon ordinaire, c’est d’aller apres les inclinations de nostre apetit, à gauche, à dextre, contre-mont, contre-bas, selon que le vent des occasions nous emporte” (333)]. But his questioning of the very possibility of constancy becomes more acute in a passage from the B layer of the Essais, representing the textual additions he made for the 1588 edition. He augmented these in the C layer that Marie de Gournay incorporated into her posthumous 1595 edition of her mentor’s work, from which Florio did his translation: Both Smith and Magnien detail and comment on the extensive allusions and borrowings that each author made from the other’s work, which occurred beginning with De constantia, through the publication of both the augmented 1588 edition of the Essais and the 1589 publication of the Politica, to the posthumous 1595 edition of Montaigne’s book. I raise all my observations on this relationship with an eye to understanding both Montaigne’s treatment of Lipsian constancy and Shakespeare’s engagement with this part of sixteenth-century political thought. 17 Paul J. Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 205; “Montaigne, Juste Lipse et l’art du voyage,” The Romanic Review 94.1-2 (2003): 75; Magnien 1998, 212-13. 18 Magnien 1996, 1998, 2004 passim. 19 Magnien 2004. The Mobility of Constancy 81 [B] The blast of accidents, doth not only remove me according to this inclination; for besides I remove and trouble my selfe by the instability of my posture, and whosoever looketh narrowly about himselfe, shall hardly see himselfe twise in one same state. Sometimes I give my soule one visage, and sometimes another, according to the posture or side I lay hir-in. If I speake diversly of myselfe, it is because I looke diversly upon my selfe. All contrarieties are found in hir, according to some turne or remooving, and in some fashion or other. Shamefast, bashfull, insolent, [C] chaste, luxurious, [B] peevish, pratling, silent, fond, doting, labourious, nice, delicate, ingenious, slowe, dull, froward, humorous, debonaire, [C] wise, ignorant, false in wordes, true-speaking, both liberall, covetous, and prodigall. [B] All these I perceive in some measure or other to bee in me, according as I stirre or turne my selfe; And whosoever shall heedefully survay and consider himselfe, shall finde this volubilitie and discordance to be in himselfe, yea and in his very judgement. I have nothing to say entirely, simply, and with soliditie of my selfe, without confusion, disorder, blending, mingling; and in one word, Distinguo is the most universal part of my logike. (2.1.195) [[B] Non seulement le vent des accidens me remue selon son inclination, mais en outre je me remue et trouble moy mesme par l’instabilité de ma posture; et qui y regarde primement, ne se trouve guere deux fois en mesme estat. Je donne à mon ame tantost un visage, tantost un autre, selon le costé où je la couche. Si je parle diversement de moy, c’est que je me regarde diversement. Toutes les contrarietez s’y trouvent selon quelque tour et en quelque façon. Honteux, insolent; [C] chaste, luxurieux; [B] bavard, taciturne; laborieux, delicat; ingenieux, hebeté; chagrin, debonaire; menteur, veritable; [C] sçavant, ignorant, et liberal, et avare, et prodigue, [B] tout cela, je vois en moy aucunement, selon que je me vire; et quiconque s’estudie bien attentifvement trouve en soy, voire et en son jugement mesme, cette volubilité et discordance. Je n’ay rien à dire de moy, entierement, simplement, et solidement, sans confusion et sans meslange, ne en un mot. Distingo est le plus universel membre de ma Logique. (335)] Montaigne here develops quite descriptively the different states his mind can be in, hence illustrating through accumulatio the daunting evidence against easy access to a constant state for any human being. But he goes further than that: for the person who “shall hardly see himselfe twise in one same state” [“ne se trouve guere deux fois en mesme estat”]—that is, everyone—this inconstancy takes hold “voire et en son jugement mesme” [“yea and in his very judgement”], in that same faculty by which he or she would make the observation about what state he or she is in. If each state of mind is actually different and mostly unrelated to preceding and succeeding ones, then the judgments in these states will not be comparable to each other, and any idea of maintaining a steadiness of emotion in the face of anything, never mind adversity, becomes completely out of the question. This evaluation of constancy is effectively a reply to Lipsius’s De constantia. H ASSAN M ELEHY 82 Montaigne, Lipsius, and the State The closest Montaigne comes in the Essais to blatantly taking aim at Lipsius is in “How One Ought to Govern His Will [De mesnager sa volonté]” (3.10), first published in 1588 with additions in 1595, where he relies on the same phrase on stagecraft that Lipsius quotes, a slight rewording of John of Salisbury’s paraphrasing gloss on Petronius. 20 In his edition of the Essais, Albert Thibaudet indicates Lipsius as Montaigne’s source for this quotation, on this point following Pierre Villey. 21 [B] Most of our vacations are like playes. Mundus universus exercet histrionem. All the world doth practise stage-playing. We must play our parts duely, but as the part of a borrowed personage. Of a visard and appearance, wee should not make a reall essence, nor proper of that which is anothers. We cannot distinguish the skinne from the shirt. [C] It is sufficient to disguise the face, without deforming the breast. [B] I see some transforme and transubstantiate themselves, into as many new formes and strange beings, as they undertake charges: and who emprelate themselves even to the heart and entrailes; and entraine their offices even sitting on their close stoole. (3.10.604-605) [[B] La plus part de nos vacations sont farcesques. “Mundus universus exercet histrionem.” Il faut jouer deuement nostre rolle, mais comme rolle d’un personnage emprunté. Du masque et de l’apperence il n’en faut pas faire une essence réelle, ny de l’estranger le propre. Nous ne sçavons pas distinguer la peau de la chemise. [C] C’est assés de s’enfariner le visage, sans s’enfariner la poictrine. [B] J’en vois qui se transforment et se transsubtantient en autant de nouvelles figures et de nouveaux estres qu’ils entreprennent de charges, et qui se prelatent jusques au foye et aux intestins, et entreinent leur office jusques en leur garderobe. (1011-12)] In addition to the quotation, this passage addresses chapter 8 of book 1 of De constantia in that it treats the same subject, the loss of the self when roles are played. For Lipsius, a citizen’s commitment to the polity is nonexistent when he or she disguises self-interest by playing the role of being concerned. Constancy guards against the disturbance of personal loss and enables an interest in the greater stability of the polity. Similarly, Montaigne speaks of citizens who are unable to carry out their functions because their prime concern is the narcissistic one of making their office into themselves, not recognizing a separate self that is not interested in the outcome of public decisions. Yet Montaigne’s focus differs somewhat from that of Lipsius in De constantia: whereas 20 Ioannis Saresberiensis (John of Salisbury), Policraticus, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rehan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993-), 3.8, 194-95. See also R.V. Young, in Lipsius 2011, 41n35; and Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), 138-40. 21 Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres complètes, eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 1659n; Pierre Villey, Les sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne (1908; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), vol. 1, 162. The Mobility of Constancy 83 Lipsius insists that the constant citizen must never engage in the dissimulation of theater, Montaigne takes the inevitabilty of such dissimulation as a given, making the case that the citizen will do well by not taking the requisite roles too seriously. However, Montaigne is not speaking generally here of citizens, but rather of those involved in affairs of state, those who hold charges (positions of service to the state)—he thereby highlights the political dimension of the arguments of De constantia, in anticipation of the Politica, which was published in the following year, 1589. In the latter work constancy also plays a major role, as Lipsius affirms by tying the two together in his opening remarks. 22 For they are highly to be blamed, who being irresolute and uncertaine, are carried hither and thither, as the affection of others doth leade them, being sometimes of one opinion, sometimes of another, ballancing the evill, or good of the commonwealth, as the arrogancie, and dissimulation of those which do governe, dothe leade them. In chapter 5 of book 3, Lipsius specifies five requirements for the counselors to the sovereign: piety, liberty of speech, constancy, modesty, and secrecy. For such persons, explains Lipsius, constancy is necessary, although it differs from the same virtue in citizens, which excludes “pietie” (“pietas,” De constantia, 1.8.88/ 40—“dutifulness,” a reverence for one’s homeland). He quotes Sallust: 23 [Nam illaudati, qui ex aliena libidine huc illuc fluctuantes agitantur: interdum alia, deinde alia decernunt. Uti eorum qui dominantur simultas atque arrogantia fert, ita bonum malumve publicam existimant (358)]. The larger reason for the constancy of counselors is that the state must be constant, and hence the sovereign also. The stable government, says Lipsius, is the one that is “severe, constant, and restrained” (4.9.78) [“Severa …, Constans, … Adstricta” (427)]. He explains the second requirement: 22 Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, trans. and ed. Jan Waszink (Assen: van Gorcum, 2004): “You see that the work which I now present to you is a politics. In which it is my aim, just as it was in De Constantia I equipped citizens for endurance and obedience, now to equip those who rule for governing” (“The Rationale and Form of This Work,” 231) [“… nunc tibi damus, Politica esse vides, in quibus hoc nobis consilium, ut quemadmodum in Constantia cives formavimus ad patiendum et parendum; ita hic eos qui imperant, ad regendum” (“De consilio et forma nostri operis,” 230)]. Although I will subsequently quote the 1594 English translation of the Politica by William Jones, since this section of the book does not appear in the latter version, I rely on this extraordinary facing text edition; it is also my source for Lipsius’s Latin. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. 23 Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, trans. William Jones (London: William Ponsonby, 1594), book 4, chapter 9, 47. For the same reasons I quote from other early editions, I quote from this one; italicized text in the Politica usually signals a quotation, which is attributed in the margins of the book. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. H ASSAN M ELEHY 84 The second thing I desire, is that the forme of government may be constant, which I interpret to be, when it runneth after one and the same ancient tenour. What do you talke of change? heare the true opinion of Alcybiades: Those men live safest, who do governe their commonwealth, without altering awhit their present customes and lawes, albeit they be not altogether good.” (4.9.80) [Secundo, Constantem volui imperii Formam: quod interpretor, uno et veteri tenore fluentem. Quid mihi mutas? Alcibadem audi vere censentem: … Eos hominum tutissime agere, qui praesentibus moribus legibusque, etiamsi detiores sint, minimum variantes, rempublicam administrant (428—I omit the Greek text that Lipsius quotes).] It is of note that for Lipsius, stability outweighs justice—indeed that changing the laws is the mark of state instability. He writes, And there are two reasons of this paradoxe. First, that the lawes themselves have not sufficient strength and life, when they are to be soone altered, or abrogated … Next, that the Prince is little set by, who wavereth in such sort. [Et inopinati dogmatis caussa duplex. Quod nec leges ipsae vim et vitam satis habeant, vertendae statim aut evertendae … Et quod Princeps vilescit, qui sic vacillat …] The bedrock of state constancy is the constancy of the sovereign. However, quite unlike the citizen’s constancy, sovereign constancy must depend on dissimulation, indeed is impossible without it. Since few people will be honest when dealing with a head of state, the sovereign can establish trust only by giving an appearance of it: And therefore Dissimulation is necessarie, which I have set downe and taught in the second place: the which may rightly be sayd to be the daughter of distrust. But some one will say unto me, What needeth this dissembling, if there be a mutuall faith betweene us? Dissimulation is that which discovereth the countenance, and covereth the mind. (4.14.117; the quotation, the latter italic text, is from Cicero) [Itque Dissimulatio adsumenda, quam posui et suasi loco altero: quae vere Diffidentiae huius proles. Quid enim ea opus, si mutua inter nos fides? Haec est, quae frontem aperit mentem tegit. (516)] Lipsius here anticipates an objection stemming from his own De constantia, expressed again with a quotation from Cicero: “This will peradventure displease some liberall and free heart, who will say, that we must banish from all conditions and sorts of life, disguising and dissembling” (117) [“Displicebit hoc ingenua alicui fronti, et clamabit: Ex omni vita Simulatio, Dissimulatioque tollenda est” (516)]. To this Lipsius responds, articulating the contrast between citizen and sovereign constancy, that of De constantia and that of the Politica: “I advouch, it ought not to bee amongst privat persons, but in a state I utterly denie it. They shall never governe well, who know not how to cover well …” (117) [“De privata, factor: de publica, valde nego. Numquam regent, The Mobility of Constancy 85 qui non tegent …” (516)]. As Lipsius elaborates this idea, he returns to the notion of the political world as a stage: “They which are so open,…who carrie their heart, as they say, on their forehead shall never be fit to play their part upon this stage …” (117-18—the quotation is from Ennius) [“Et qui animum, quod dicitur, in fronte promptum gerunt: Numquam apti huic theatro” (518)]. So those who govern must do so wearing a mask, or playing a role, and can be most effectively constant if they do so. 24 By discussing the inevitability of role-playing for those holding state administrative positions, Montaigne anticipates this passage. But by indirectly citing De constantia in “How One Ought to Govern His Will” through the quotation that paraphrases Petronius, he is also playing two different notions of constancy against each other. Montaigne makes it clear that the roleplaying in government, when one takes it too seriously, will lead to bad governing. Speaking of his own administrative duty, that of Mayor of Bordeaux, he advocates a strict division between private and public life: “The Maior of Bordeaux and Michell Lord of Montaigne, have ever been two, by evident separation” (3.10.605) [“Le Maire et Montaigne ont toujours esté deux, d’une separation bien claire” (1012)]. But the reasons for this distinction are different from those of Lipsius: whereas for the latter a controlled role-playing will permit the constancy of the private person to be publicly effective in his or her exercise of sovereignty, for Montaigne the corruption of public roleplaying is inevitable but will not affect private life if one recognizes the difference between the two. This ends up being true for the public situation of not just those in government administration: To be an advocate or a Treasurer, one should not be ignorant of the craft incident to such callings. An honest man is not comptable for the vice and foly of his trade, and therefore ought not to refuse the exercise of it. It is the custome of his country; and there is profite in it. (605) [Pour estre advocat ou financier, il n’en faut pas mesconnoistre la fourbe qu’il y a en telles vacations. Un honneste homme n’est pas comptable du vice ou sottise de son mestier, et ne doibt pourtant en refuser l’exercice: c’est l’usage de son pays, et il y a du proffict. (1012)] Here Montaigne slyly turns his discussion of dissimulation against the treatment of the topic in De constantia: since the deception of law and finance cannot be avoided, there is no point in trying to do so—yet doing so doesn’t affect the honesty or honor of the private person, as long as the latter preserves his or her own realm. This is the case even when the dishonest profession brings advantages for the honest person. 24 On the state as a metaphorical stage on which the sovereign acts before citizen spectators, see Jan Waszink, “Introduction,” in Lipsius, Politica (2004): 102-104. H ASSAN M ELEHY 86 In the next sentence, Montaigne returns to the question of dissimulation and the sovereign: But the judgement of an Emperour should be above his Empire; and to see and consider the same as a strange accident. He should know howe to enjoy himselfe aparte; and communicate himselfe as James and Peter; at least to himselfe. (605) [Mais le jugement d’un Empereur doit estre au dessus de son empire, et le voir et considerer comme accident estranger; et luy, doit sçavoir jouyr de soy à part et se communicquer comme Jacques et Pierre, au moins à soy-mesmes. (1012)] The sovereign must maintain a complete separation between himself and his function as emperor. That is, his role as emperor, his exercise of judgment over it, must be quite distinct from his own private self, his moy, which, whenever Montaigne treats it in the Essais, is anything but constant. The constancy of an emperor, his capacity to be firm and maintain stability, subsists entirely in his role-playing. Montaigne anticipates the notion of the dissimulation or stage-acting of the sovereign that Lipsius will advance in the Politica. The essayist does this by way of an indirect commentary on De constantia: he is critical of both notions of constancy, finding the one untenable and the other something whose effectiveness is dependent on one’s taking ironic distance from it. His oblique reference to Lipsius, by way of the Petronius phrase, is in keeping, then, with his practice of quotation, which frequently involves marked alterations or even inversions of contextual meaning. 25 He does this through close textual borrowing in connection with Lipsius elsewhere in the Essais, particularly, as Smith extensively demonstrates, in “Of Vanitie [De la vanité].” 26 Although Montaigne didn’t read the Politica until its 1589 publication, in an extant letter from 1588 Lipsius refers to a prior discussion of his book in progress with his correspondent. 27 Staging Constancy Especially given his intimate knowledge of and engagement with his Dutch contemporary’s work up to that point, Montaigne’s detailed anticipation of certain ideas of the Politica is quite plausible. That Shakespeare was familiar with Montaigne has long been accepted: the Bard probably knew John Florio, Montaigne’s translator, and may well have 25 John O’Brien provides several examples to demonstrate this strategy of Montaigne: “Montaigne and Antiquity: Fancies and Grotesques,” in Ullrich Langer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 54-58. 26 Smith (2003, 2007) shows how Montaigne takes implicit aim at Lipsius in “De la vanité,”criticizing him through ironic inversions. 27 Epistola XLV / lettre 45, in Magnien 2004, 108/ 109. The Mobility of Constancy 87 seen the translation in manuscript several years before its 1603 publication. 28 But a moment later he is swayed again. When Decius arrives to escort him to the Senate, Caesar responds by saying that he is not going: “The cause is in my Will” (2.271). Now he is appealing to the Stoic agency of constancy, the will, which will overcome all opposition. Shakespeare is also punning on his own name, suggesting that his character’s constancy is an effect of the dramatist’s work and of drama itself, hence continuing the play’s paradox of constancy. Then Decius overpowers Caesar’s will through theatrical persuasion, presenting arguments that he clearly doesn’t believe. The first of these is an alternate interpretation of Calphurnia’s foreboding dream, and his subsequent proposals have the character of theater and also underscore the inconstancy that runs through Roman state functions: But beyond acknowledgement of one clear reworking of Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes [Des cannibales]” (1.31) in The Tempest and a number of apparent allusions, there have been few scholarly attempts at considering a detailed engagement on Shakespeare’s part with Montaigne. Miles admits the idea that Montaigne is a source for Shakespeare’s treatment of constancy in Julius Caesar, but he doesn’t pursue textual specifics and hence doesn’t examine the consequences for current understandings of early modern political thought. Whatever one wishes to make of a biographical likelihood of such an engagement, the critique of Lipsius that Montaigne effects also turns up in Julius Caesar. It is not only the case that actors provide the model for constancy in the play, but also that Caesar’s private person is quite distinct from Caesar the emperor, who is constant through theatrical display. The difference is underscored by the rampant personal inconstancy that he displays in advance of his affirmation of constancy at the very end of his life. In the exchange with Calphurnia that begins with her account of the portents of his death (2.2), Caesar sways repeatedly in the face of her emotions. In response to her, he at first insists on his firmness. But Calphurnia continues to speak of the danger, asking him to regard the fear as her own and not his. Moved by her pleading, he tells her, “For thy humor I will stay at home” (2.2.56). He thus allows himself to be inconstant, displacing his fear onto the very worst, quite feminine source of inconstancy, her “humor.” The Senate have concluded To give this day, a Crowne to mighty Caesar. If you shall send them word you will not come, Their mindes may change. Besides, it were a mocke 28 More than a century ago Elizabeth Robbins Hooker first suggested that Shakespeare likely read Florio’s translation of Montaigne in manuscript: “The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne,” PMLA 17.2 (1902): 349-50. See also Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 50-51; Miles, 83-84. H ASSAN M ELEHY 88 Apt to be render’d, for some one to say, Breake up the Senate, till another time: When Caesars wife shall meete with better Dreames. If Caesar hide himselfe, shall they not whisper Loe Caesar is affraid? (2.2.93-101) Decius makes the effort to tempt Caesar through imperial spectacle, the crown that will confirm the public image of the latter’s status. Since it is Caesar’s very constancy, Decius signals, that prompts the Senate to do this, a lack of resolve on Caesar’s part will lead to the Senate’s own inconstancy on the matter. Then Decius attempts to persuade Caesar with the prospect of mockery at ceding to Calphurnia’s humor. That is, maintaining power over the Senators requires Caesar to keep up appearances. Part of these, says Decius, involves an image of fearlessness: the implication is that suspicions of Caesar’s fear may be well founded. All these considerations affect Caesar’s ability to give an impression of constancy before the Senate. He extends the paradox: in order to maintain his constancy, he responds with inconstancy, yielding to Decius’s theatrics and changing his mind. It is not clear which of Decius’s arguments Caesar is reacting to; whether it is all or any of them, his words expose his constancy as a spectacular effect, performed as a general response to the theatrics of Decius and the Senate. 29 The play in which Shakespeare makes a central theme of princely wavering is of course Hamlet, which was probably written about the same time as Julius Caesar, 30 What would he doe, and which is also of interest in connection with Lipsius, theatrics, and constancy. In his inconstancy, Hamlet becomes envious of an actor for being able to put on a show of grief, in words that seem to allude strikingly to the phrase “fil the theatre with true teares,” from the passage in the translation of De constantia in which Lipsius discusses the Roman actor Polus. The wording of this part of the soliloquy first appears in the Second Quarto of 1604: Had he the Motive and the Cue for passion That I have? He would drowne the Stage with teares, And cleave the generall eare with horrid speech; Make mad the guilty and apale the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed, 29 Miles: “Immovable Caesar vacillates between the demands of fear, ambition, and dread of ridicule” (131). 30 Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006), 47. The very faculty of Eyes and Eares. 31 The Mobility of Constancy 89 Unlike Polus, Hamlet’s actor can put on a compelling show of tears with no real cause for grief; if he had such a cause, his display would be that much more spectacular. The actor’s simulation demonstrates Hamlet’s action, or rather inaction, hence providing the prince with a model for expressing his own grief. Polus is the actor who needs true grief in order to cry convincingly; Hamlet is the prince who looks to the actor as an exemplar of the constancy he knows his office to require, following his father’s murder. As do characters in Julius Caesar, Hamlet appears to take it for granted that the most effective governing, which is the most constant, is modeled on the comportment of actors. However, his notion of constancy diverges considerably from that of Lipsius: rather than distancing himself from shows of emotion, Hamlet wishes to embrace them as the proper way to be decisive and constant in the face of disruption to the state. In As You Like It Shakespeare unmistakably alludes to John of Salisbury/ Petronius when he writes, “All the world’s a stage.” 32 This line, which opens Jaques’s “seven ages of man” speech, announces the most pervasive and overarching theme in the corpus of Shakespeare’s drama, a Latin version of which for years was even said to be the motto of the Globe Theatre, an idea that has met with serious contestation. 33 But even if it did figure on the building, which was completed in 1599, it appeared first in As You Like It, which Shakespeare probably wrote in late 1598 or 1599, 34 soon after the time that Florio, his biographer Frances Yates believed, began his translation of Montaigne. 35 31 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.497-501—my emphasis. For the First Folio spelling, The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, ed. Neil Freeman (New York and London: Applause, 2000). The speech provides a panorama of the social roles that human beings play as they progress through life in a fashion entirely reminiscent of Montaigne’s accounts. Since the quotation was available to Shakespeare in both Montaigne and Lipsius, becoming a commonplace through them, this use of it can correctly be called an allusion to both these authors. Florio’s rendition, “All the world doth practise stage-playing,” quite literally conveys the phrase “Mundus universus exercet histrionem.” Stradling’s translation in Of Constancie is “The whol world is a stage-play.” Curiously, Shakespeare’s phrase seems to combine the two—just as his treatment of constancy and theatrical dissimulation in Julius Caesar suggests a detailed response to 32 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Arden, 2006), 2.7.140. The First Folio spelling is the same. 33 Tiffany Stern, (1997). “Was ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ ever the motto of the Globe Theatre? ,” Theatre Notebook 51.3: 122-27. 34 Dusinbere, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1. 35 Frances A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934), 233. H ASSAN M ELEHY 90 Lipsius by way of Montaigne, a mobility of the notion from one author to the other in the late sixteenth century. The Stage of Sovereignty Textual evidence notwithstanding, it is only of minor interest that Shakespeare likely drew on Lipsius as a source; what matters for literary criticism and current understandings of early modern political thought is the critical effect of this process on the reading and circulation of Lipsius’s text. Certainly in the treatment of constancy in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare follows and extends Montaigne’s critique: when even a Roman tyrant wavers in his personal behavior, his characterizations cut into the very possibility of the constant self necessary to Lipsius’s exposition in De constantia. Moreover, when Caesar and the most noble Brutus are constant mainly through theatrical machination, there is a direct engagement with the Lipsian idea that such a procedure undermines personal constancy. Shakespeare takes this critique even further by confronting Lipsius’s notion that the sovereign reinforces his constancy through theatrics, since in Julius Caesar theater performed as constancy only works to weaken and even destroy the latter. For Shakespeare, constancy becomes nothing but a cover for a lack of constancy and continual promotion of self-interest, exactly what for Lipsius it should not be—the sovereign, for Lipsius, engages in dissimulation in order to preserve the polity. The very idea of state constancy becomes problematic when Rome itself is shaken to its foundations—the city and empire served as a model for state legitimacy in early modern France and England, both through assimilations of the modern state to the ancient one and through narratives of continuity between the two. Of course, historians and other writers also emphasized the civil wars that made Rome a model of instability and inconstancy. As Montaigne writes of the state of Rome in “Of Vanitie,” “It containeth in it selfe all formes and fortunes that concerne a state: whatsoever order, trouble, good or bad fortune may in any sorte effect in it” (3.9.574) [“Il comprend en soy toutes les formes et avantures qui touchent un estat: tout ce que l’ordre y peut et le trouble, et l’heur et le malheur” (960)]. What is remarkable in Shakespeare’s rendition is not simply that Rome concentrates both order and trouble, constancy and inconstancy, but that constancy itself stems directly from inconstancy and becomes part of it. Shakespeare’s work raises questions about its own role in state legitimation, and in the same set of gestures it interrogates the legitimating function of Lipsius’s political thought by casting doubt on its very tenability. In making these observations, I do not mean to recycle the idea of Shakespeare’s political subversiveness; I do, however, wish to take issue with lingering understandings of his politics as largely reflective of dominant state The Mobility of Constancy 91 interest. As I mentioned at the outset, recent research explores Shakespeare’s engagement with sixteenth-century political thought: nonetheless, there remains plenty of room to discern the critical stances that his plays frequently take. My purpose in this essay is to propose a consideration of previously unrecognized ways in which political thought circulated in early modern Europe, and how effective it was as it did so. It turns out that the very important notion of constancy is mobilized in the writings of both Montaigne, a writer usually thought to be reserved in his political statements, and Shakespeare, a dramatist who contributed heavily to pageantries of royal legitimation. H ASSAN M ELEHY 92 Works Cited Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Vol. 2. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953. Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. 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Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006. ---. The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. Ed. Neil Freeman. New York and London: Applause, 2000. ---. Julius Caesar. Ed. David Daniell. London: Arden, 1998. ---. The Tragedie of Julius Caesar. Ed. Neil Freeman. New York and London: Applause, 1998. Smith, Paul J. “Montaigne, Juste Lipse et l’art du voyage.” The Romanic Review 94.1-2 (2003): 73-91. ---. Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007. Stern, Tiffany. “Was ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ ever the motto of the Globe Theatre? ” Theatre Notebook 51.3 (1997): 122-27. Wells, Charles. The Northern Star: Shakespeare and the Theme of Constancy. Worcester: Blackthorn, 1989. Yates, Frances A. John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934. C HRISTOPH E HLAND The Stage Is Not Enough: Early Modern Drama and the Representation of Movement 1. Movement and Drama Famously, the prologue speaker of Shakespeare’s Henry V laments the limitations and shortcomings of the stage. When he poses the rhetorical question whether the “wooden O” of the theatre can accommodate the historical sujet of the play, his concerns are primarily the challenges of movement and space for the dramatic action. This essay will investigate the relationship between the stage and the representation of movement as a distinct generic problem and as a challenge to theatrical performance. In what follows, the discussion will combine paradigmatic inferences with a historical reading of two plays by Thomas Heywood and John Day. These texts have been chosen so that the discussion can start from the vantage point of literary and cultural history in the British Isles at a time when the medium of the theatre enjoys an unprecedented eminence and the experience of a widening global horizon is at its freshest. Like no other previous period in English history, the early modern age is characterised by the impact of the experience of mobility and the discovery of movement on a global scale. The particular vigour of this experience is often discussed with reference to the traces it left in early modern cartography and travel writing. In this context maps and travelogues represent means of ordering and arranging the experience. Within the English context, however, it seems necessary to give thought to yet another medium: the theatre. Despite the obvious problems and limitations of the stage in containing movement and mobility, theatrical praxis serves to communicate and propagate the geographical expansion in the early modern period. In fact, it is the unique propensity of the theatre not only to contemplate and reflect this experience but to make it tangible. With regard to this it is fair to say that it is the stage which makes the widening horizon of English society part of its popular collective consciousness. Beyond a content-oriented reading of early modern theatre it is useful to attempt to conceptualise the performative potential of the stage. The German sociologist Martina Löw has discussed the cultural processes by which space is created. She writes: C HRISTOPH E HLAND 96 Im Mittelpunkt [...] steht nun die Frage, was angeordnet wird (Dinge, Ereignisse etc.? ), wer anordnet (mit welchem Recht, mit welcher Macht? ) und wie Räume entstehen, sich verflüchtigen, materialisieren oder verändern und somit Gesellschaft strukturieren. 1 With regard to the theatre the immediate attraction and applicability of Löw’s idea of space as “eine relationale (An)ordnung von Körpern [...], die ständig in Bewegung sind” (153; “a relational arrangement of bodies which are constantly shifting,” my trans.) is evident. Transferring the sociological concept to theatrical practice, it becomes clear that the stage and the bodies that people it not only echo social experience but necessarily abstract from it. The stage must be seen as a tabula rasa, as it were, which requires with each performance that its practitioners give identity to those bodies and contexts they aim to represent. The unique propensity of the stage is its flexibility to acquire ever changing spatial identities and thus to allow it to relate to distant territories. Actors on the theatrical stage do not enter a pre-structured scene. It is their performance which generates the relational and hegemonic order of the imagined world. Narrowing this discussion down to the phenomenon of mobility and its representation on stage, it can be inferred that movement serves to foreground assumed relational orders and at the same time has the propensity to change them. As the discussion of two selected plays by Thomas Heywood and John Day will show, this notion is of particular relevance for our understanding of the social function of early modern theatre: in this period the stage provides a medium of space which not only allows the representation of the experience and practice of a new expansive ideology but also permits us to come to terms with the impact of new forms of mobility on English society. 2. Space, Expansion and Dramatic Action: Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West There is probably no other period in which English society was witness to a more profound geographical and cultural widening of its horizons than around the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. As Anthony Grafton has shown in New Worlds, Ancient Texts, for most European societies the period from 1550 to 1650 was marked by a revolution in their understanding of the world: real experience gradually replaced bookish conjecture and the scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages gave way to the 1 Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 150. “Now the central questions are: what is being arranged (things, events, etc.? ), who arranges (according to what right or power? ), and how do spaces develop, disappear, materialise or change and thus structure society? ” (my translation). The Stage Is Not Enough 97 emergence of modern science. 2 If this transition is a pan-European phenomenon fostered by colonial expansion and fuelled by the experience of travel on a global scale, the English situation still deserves particular attention. While Spain and Portugal had firmly established their colonial territories in the Americas, England dreamt of rather than lived its colonial endeavours. Although much may have remained in the realm of dreams for the time being, books such as Richard Hakluyt’s The Principle Navigations (1589) not only give evidence for a form of colonial propaganda which Peter Mancall has called “[a]n Elizabethan’s obsession for an English America,” 3 but also, and most particularly, document the influx of novel experiences and the spread of new knowledge in English society. As London rapidly grew from a regional centre into one of European if not global significance, the English increasingly witnessed this influx from a privileged vantage point. 4 A striking example of the rapid modernisation of English thinking in this period is provided by the English translation of the German Faustbuch. Only five years after the original was published in Frankfurt in 1587 a translation of this notorious book was offered to the English reader. Despite the fact that contemporary translations were generally fairly free the departures of the translation of the English Faust Book from its source are still remarkable. This anonymous translation not only smoothes the fairly uncouth German text into an elegant narrative but also sets out to correct and expand what must have seemed scientific anachronisms to the English mind: cosmological imprecision is corrected and scientific and geographical data are carefully modernised and expanded. 5 2 Grafton writes: “This new understanding of the world grew from roots planted outside the realm of learning. And it drew much of its sustenance from one of them in particular: the movement, led by practical men rather than scholars, that Europeans called the discovery of the New World.” New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA/ London: U of Harvard P, 1995 (1992)), 5. The English Faust Book and its departures from its 3 Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007), subtitle. 4 Deborah E. Harkness captures the climate of the city in her book The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 2007), 1-2: “London grew from a small urban center of some 50,000 in 1550 to the second-largest city in Europe by 1600, with more than 200,000 residents. […] Elizabethan Londoners were sophisticated and cosmopolitan, living cheek by jowl with immigrants from France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The City’s residents included Africans, Ottoman Turks, and Jewish conversos. […] Life on the City’s streets, below the church spires and under the walkways of the Exchange, was both creative and competitive - the ideal environment for cultural and intellectual change.” 5 Cf. John Henry Jones’s critical edition of The English Faust Book (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 11-34. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 98 German source epitomise the fact that the experience of modernity has taken a firm foothold in English society. Turning back to the role and function of the theatre in these transitional times, it seems fair to say that there has hardly been another phase in English history in which its society had a more innovative and versatile means of literary communication than this period and its theatre. The stage becomes the medium by which the new experience of the world is circulated and domesticated: “So extravagant was the geographical variety offered by the playhouses that Thomas Platter considered one useful service performed by the theatres for Londoners was that of learning at the play what is happening abroad.” 6 The Swiss physician Thomas Platter (1574-1628) is but one of the travellers who came to London to be astonished by the variety of theatrical activity in England’s capital. In his diary of his journey to England in 1599 he observes that the stage has become a local display cabinet, as it were, for international events. The theatre’s somewhat paradoxical role as simultaneously a cultural medium and a commercial product fosters the emergence of hybrid dramatic forms, such as the history play or the adventure romance. In fact English playwrights began searching for modes of representation beyond classical models of tragedy or comedy which allowed them not only to entertain their audience but also to give expression to contemporary experience. In this context belongs also the development of the genre of the adventure romance, which is characterised by a paradigmatic widening of the spatial structure of the dramatic action. Despite the obvious generic problems of such a development for the stage, the inspiration for these new plays was often taken from epic pretexts. If the majority of plays written between 1560 and 1590 dealt with classical or medieval subjects there is a notable shift from the 1590s towards current geopolitical affairs in adventure romances. 7 Popular romance in the early phase concerns heroes who are remote in every way; meanwhile court romance characteristically invites oblique application to real persons of the time while sustaining the fictional nature of the material. In the 1590s and later, forms of romance are evolved by the playwrights in which identifiable In this process the classical and mythological personnel are replaced by more or less contemporary English heroes. Brian Gibbons writes in this context: 6 Crystal Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City,’” ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion, 2000), 16. 7 Cf. Brian Gibbons, “Romance and the Heroic Play,” The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, eds. Albert R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 215f. The Stage Is Not Enough 99 real persons of the past and the present are represented, their stories given in romantic form […]. 8 The continuous pressure of the ongoing war with Spain and the wave of patriotic relief after the failed invasion of 1588 can at least partly be held accountable for this development. Alongside such texts as George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (around 1588) and John Day’s The Three English Brothers (1607), Thomas Heywood’s two-part play The Fair Maid of the West (first part between 1596 and 1603, second part probably around 1631) is representative of the later phase of the genre. Typically, these hybrid texts combine multifarious generic features: they are partly history play, partly heroic epic, partly romantic comedy. Although individual emphases may vary, all of them have in common that they domesticate the romantic hero. 9 In Heywood’s case the protagonist is even made middle-class and feminine. 10 In his preface to the reader in The Fair Maid of the West Thomas Heywood emphasises the mimetic principle of his work. He discriminates between the act of “private reading” and the “public acting” of the play: if the reader’s perusal of the text is meant to be merely “gracious” the performance has to be “plausible.” It is significant that Heywood refers not only to the credibility of the storyline but also to the comprehensibility of the stage production: The popular mixture of sentimental love story, exotic adventure and patriotic call to duty caters for the prevalent taste of the bawdier audiences on the South Bank. At the same time, however, one can detect traces of publicly sanctioned, early colonial propaganda. The shift towards English subjects in these plays goes along with a heightened mimetic demand on the representation of space and movement and the relational order they create. These Comedies, bearing the title of The fair Maid of the West, if they prove but as gracious in thy private reading, as they were plausible in the public acting, I shall not doubt of their success. […] I hold it no necessity to trouble thee with the Argument of the Story, the matter itself lying so plainly before thee in Acts and Scenes, without any deviations, or winding incidents. 11 With regard to this one should not dismiss Heywood’s text because of its popular genre but should rather pay attention to the particular accomplishments of its representation of the dramatic space. The love story between the simple barmaid Bess Bridges and the gentleman Spencer serves as a logical tie which keeps together the spatial expansion of the action and creates the necessary suspense. Their first meeting 8 Gibbons 1990, 215-16. 9 Cf. Gibbons 1990, 233. 10 The gender politics of the play are discussed by Claire Jowitt in her book Voyage, Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (2003). 11 Thomas Heywood, “To the Reader,” The Fair Maid of the West. Or, A Girl Worth Gold. The First Part (London: Richard Royston, 1631), n.p. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 100 takes place in a tavern in the harbour of Plymouth. But soon the lovers are torn apart since Spencer kills a man in self-defence and has to flee the country. It will not be necessary to follow this plot in all its sentimental detail and calculated showmanship. With regard to the treatment of the spatial perspective of the play, however, one may note that the separation of the lovers provides a parallel to the opening up of the spatial setting between home and abroad. In what follows, this widening of the spatial horizon is maintained and allows the lovers to move gradually towards each other again until they are reunited in the North African city of Fez at the end of the play. With regard to Heywood’s representational strategies of space, one can see how he mobilises his characters - namely Bess and Spencer - to widen the geographical horizon of his play. On a more abstract level this means that the play rearranges bodies on stage so as to expand the scope of its reach within its ideological contexts. Almost paradoxically, the stabilisation of its known territory - that is England - is achieved through the attribution of new coordinates within an extended network of relational positions. As this shows, the moralising plot and the propagandistic tone of the play may not detract from the fact that Heywood systematically explores space and mobility. He deliberately varies the strategies of spatial representation in each of the five acts and thus achieves not only a gradual geographical expansion of the action but also a highly differentiated tableau of correspondences and contrasts between love story and spatial development in the play. Heywood turns movement into a constitutive part of his plot by relating the emotional tie between the protagonists to the play’s spatial expanse. The audience is thus allowed to experience distance as a category which is safely harboured in the local and the domestic. Thereby the representational strategies on stage depend on the characters as acting agents of spatial construction. This is apparent right from the beginning of The Fair Maid of the West when a casual street scene creates an atmosphere of movement and mobility: 1st Captain: When puts my Lord to Sea? 2nd Captain: When the winde’s faire. Mr. Carrol: Resolve me I entreat, can you not guesse The purpose of this voyage? 1st Captain: Most men thinke The Fleet’s bound for the Islands 12 Mr. Carrol: Nay, tis like. The great success at Cales under the conduct Of such a Noble Generall, hath put heart Into the English: They are all on fire To purchase from the Spaniard. If their Carracks Come deeply laden, we shall tugge with them 12 This refers to the English attack on the Spanish Azores in 1597. The Stage Is Not Enough 101 For golden spoil. 2nd Captain: O, were it come to that! 1st Captain: How Plymouth swells with Gallants! How the streets Glister with gold! You cannot meet a man But trick’d in scarffe and feather, that it seemes As if the pride of Englands Gallantry Were harboured here. [...] (The Fair Maid 1.1, 1-15) This opening scene is exemplary for the process by which the communication among the characters turns the tabula rasa of the stage into a specific place. Just as the talk of the mariners is integrated casually into the background of the play, so does the tone of the maritime activities set by this scene become a dominant factor in the action. Geographical allusions serve to put things into a wider context. In particular the references to England’s conflict with Spain (here the English raid on Cádiz in 1596 13 and the so-called “Islands Voyage,” the English assault on the Azores in 1597 14 As the scene quoted above illustrates, Heywood uses an atmospheric brushwork, as it were, to create for his play a differentiation between home and abroad which will provide the fundamental structure to his argument. If the conversation of the mariners initially serves to open up the domestic sphere, one can see that Spencer’s subsequent flight will complement the action with the dimension of the foreign and the distant. The positional relationship between England and the world beyond is systematically voiced and defines the scenery: symptomatically Bess’s question “is my Spencer gone? ” is answered in the play by “With speed towards Foy / There to take ship for Fayal” (1.3, 82-84). The image of a seafaring nation is painted: the talk of harbours, ships and mariners constitutes its attributes on stage. The reports of the comings and goings of the ships are displayed as the common discourse of a society which since the days of Richard Hakluyt has increasingly been looking beyond the shores of the ‘scept’red isle.’ ) give the action an acute political topicality. Beyond this, however, Heywood succeeds in this short dialogue in combining maritime milieu with local colour and thus in installing a scope of reference in his play that takes the local as its vantage point but directs the audience’s attention far beyond the English harbour city of Plymouth: distance and movement define the atmosphere of the scene but for the moment they are the background noise of another place overheard at the level of the local and the domestic. With regard to this the mariners are used as metonymical markers for a topography of a new, global experience. During the second act the direct representation of movement still remains in the background because the story first endeavours to establish the separa- 13 Cf. N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London: Penguin, 2004 (1998)), 2004, 284-86. 14 Cf. Rodger 2004, 287-88. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 102 tion of the lovers. In alternating scenes the two plotlines present contrasting localisations of the action, which depict Bess and Spencer in their different geographical places. In the second act then, the Cornish coastal village of Fowey, where Bess now lives, is set in contrast to Spencer’s exile in Fayal in the Azores. Once again one encounters the differentiation between the domestic and the foreign. Towards the end of the second act, however, this logic comes to an end when Spencer’s companion Goodlack sets out home to England because he erroneously believes his friend dead: Enter two Sailors. 1st Sailor: Aboard, aboard, the wind stands fair for England, The Ships have all weigh’d anchor. 2nd Sailor: A stiff gale blows from the shore. [...] Goodlack: This is the end of all mortality: It will be news unpleasing to his Bess. (The Fair Maid 2.4) In this scene Heywood not only uses a whole arsenal of maritime vocabulary but also makes the representation of movement from now on an integral part of his action. The fact that Spencer now also hurries home to England to catch his friend before the mistaken news can reach his beloved means that the distance between him and Bess is once again allowed to grow smaller. From this moment the ship becomes a moving place of action. Movement and mobility replace a static conception of space that so far basically relied on scenic contrasts for its spatial development. In the third act - as might have been anticipated - the mistaken news of Spencer’s death reaches Bess in England. The arrival of the depressing news in England has a further mobilising effect on the action since at this instant Bess sets out to search for the corpse of Spencer to bring him home. Given the emotional ties that exist between Bess and Spencer this departure seems logical; and the fact that Heywood now turns the female part among his protagonists into a mobile one deserves special attention. Andrew Hadfield reminds one of the fact that there is hardly any evidence of female travellers in the early modern period. On the contrary, they were “expressly forbid[den]” to travel. 15 15 Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages & Machiavels - Travel & Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 2, 4. Bess’s plans to leave England for distant territories may therefore represent the typically fantastic material for romance. At the same time, however, this turn in the events of the play is particularly meaningful for Heywood’s exploration of mobility. With regard to the symbolism of Bess’s departure the political dimension of this - that is to say the implicit analogies between Bess and Elizabeth I and the inherent discussion of the concept of female rule - has been explored in detail by Claire Jowitt. The The Stage Is Not Enough 103 protagonist’s decisiveness and call to duty, as it were, heighten and surmount her gendered vulnerability in a typically Elizabethan logic. For Bess - “in her role as a stand-in for Elizabeth” 16 - movement allows her who has “the body of a weak and feeble woman” to develop “the heart and stomach of a king.” 17 Turning back to the spatial development depicted on stage, the following observation may seem rather macabre but one can see how Heywood uses the relation between two bodies - even if one of them is assumed to be dead - to virtually measure the geographical scope of his play. In a series of scenes set on ships he now begins to move his protagonists closer to each other again. The adventures at sea in the fourth act allow Bess and Spencer to gradually overcome the distance between them. At the same time, however, their distance from their home country is continually growing. If it holds true that the signification process in the text previously relied on contrasts and correspondences between different static settings, the ship must now take over as a dynamic facilitator of meaning. With regard to this, Bess’s seafights with Spanish ships and Spencer’s captivity on a Spanish warship introduce mobility into the fabrication of these contrasts. The direct confrontation with representatives of the arch-enemy Spain heightens the awareness of one’s national identity and belonging. Spencer’s valiant endurance under torture even impresses his Spanish tormentors: “These Englishmen / Nothing can daunt them. Even in misery / They’ll not regard their masters.” (The Fair Maid 4.1, 29-31) In fact, her mobility turns gender dependencies on its head: if at the beginning of the play she is the one who needs male protection when Spencer defends her against aggressive advances and establishes her at his property at Foy, her departure will eventually put the male characters in the play at her mercy. In Heywood’s play it becomes apparent that ‘Englishness’ is not necessarily bound to the collective place of a national community - as for example Shakespeare imagines it in Richard II when the dying John of Gaunt talks about England as the “scept’red isle” and as a “fortress built by Nature for herself” (2.1, 43). In The Fair Maid Englishness depends on a dynamic experience of otherness. In this context the chorus at the end of Act 4 is an important element in the argument. Peter Holland regards Heywood’s use of a chorus as evidence for his reflection on the limitations of stage representation (quoted in context): Thomas Heywood’s Chorus in The Fair Maid of the West is reduced to a lame apology for the theatre’s handicaps: Our stage so lamely can express a sea 16 Jowitt 2003, 61. 17 Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury in 1588 as quoted in Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, An Age of Voyages, 1350-1600 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 101. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 104 That we are forc’d by Chorus to discourse What should have been in action. and immediately goes on to use the word that, more than any other, demonstrates the problem: ‘Now imagine.’ Imagine this, suppose that, think the other: the vocabulary of the unactable journey comes easily to the Renaissance dramatist’s own imagination. 18 Of course, such a passage deliberately echoes Shakespeare’s famous Prologue in Henry V mentioned at the outset. Nonetheless, even in the case of Shakespeare one must be suspicious about the true purpose of such selfmortification. If Shakespeare calls upon the “imaginary forces” (Henry V, Prologue, 18) of the audience, Heywood seems to do the same. Holland suggests that the message of the prologue is to be taken literally: for him the chorus appears and speaks in an attempt to compensate for the inability of the stage to represent movement. In the case of Heywood, however, one might ask why the chorus appears so late in the play and does so on only a single occasion. This must seem strange in a play in which scenery changes constantly and in which from the third act onwards movement dominates the dramatic action. Until the appearance of the chorus it is quite clear that the play is able to develop and explain its different settings through the characters’ own words. One must therefore ask whether the sudden appearance of a chorus really reveals a dilemma on the part of the playwright. In fact, I would argue that the apologetic tone of the chorus is only rhetorical pretence in order to separate the action of the last act symbolically from the rest of the play. By doing so Heywood accentuates the strategies of differentiation he has developed before and contrasts them with those he uses for his last act. In particular his representation of distance and exile differentiates in its spatial classification between the European opponents of England and the exotic other. The maritime scenes in which movement is shown are strictly limited to the conflict with the Spanish. If it is thus true that the Spanish enemy is experienced in these scenes as a mobile power, the representatives of the Maghreb are on the other hand seen as static and bound to their place. Movement is thus elevated to a subtle instrument of characterisation, if not stigmatisation: the protagonists experience the overseas settings and their inhabitants as static whereas the Spanish are perceived just like the English as a mobile and expansive society. The implicit effect of this differentiation is that Spain is shown as a competitor of England whereas the North Africans are seen as the representatives of the exotic other and thereby as the objects of colonial desire. 18 Peter Holland, “‘Travelling hopefully’: The Dramatic Form of Journeys in English Renaissance Drama.” Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds. Jean-Pierre Marquelot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 161. The Stage Is Not Enough 105 The entry of the chorus thus marks a watershed for the representation of the dynamic societies of the fourth act and the stasis of the Moroccan court in the fifth. The fact that the reunion of Bess and Spencer will eventually take place at the exotic court of the “amorous King of Fez” further emphasises the mobility of the English protagonists in direct contrast to their surroundings. Both English protagonists represent mobility and both are characterised by their movements: Spencer first merely drifts as an expat and later is taken against his will as a captive into far-flung places whereas Bess in search of her lover is willing to leave England and face the dangers of foreign parts. With regard to this differentiation of the experience of distance on the part of the two heroes it is fair to say that at the end of the play the rediscovery of Spencer by Bess appears almost as a reward for her mobility. In the inherent ‘lost and found’ logic of this plot development the play symbolically balances the losses and gains of mobility. In this sense the shifts between static and dynamic scenery in The Fair Maid of the West represent in their own right traces of an early colonial ideology. In this context Heywood’s play highlights the role of literary communication for the discussion and circulation of colonial strategies of differentiation. In the popular medium of the adventure romance, mobility is not only the driving force of the early colonial experience and propaganda but also the energiser of a recalibration of English national identity. The stage brings home an experience for which mobility becomes a national mission and allows the audience to partake in it. 3. Distance as Experience: John Day’s The Travails of the Three English Brothers It does not seem too far-fetched to claim that movement and mobility are the incitement of modernity. One has to come to accept movement as a premise of the modern perception of the world. Turning one’s attention to early modern texts and their representation of movement allows this phenomenon to be considered at the point in history when the acceleration is only beginning. Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West is a revealing example of the depiction of movement as an integral part of the formative processes of an expansive ideology in England. This becomes apparent not only in the theme and plot of the play but also in Heywood’s ability to combine opposing and at times conflicting developments into an apparently seamless narrative whole. For example, he puts on stage protagonists who in the course of the action will repeatedly prove their particular patriotic prowess. The text thereby somehow ignores the fact that earlier in the play the two were almost hastily bidding their home country farewell. The happy reunion of the lovers at the end of the play may detract from the fact that the constant movement of the heroes has increasingly separated them from England. The radical C HRISTOPH E HLAND 106 widening of the spatial horizon in the play and the shift from English home turf into exotic places are only superficially compensated for by the happy ending. Bess’s mobility may be symbolically rewarded in the end but with regard to the alienating consequences of the spatial distance which her movements create between herself and her home country the play remains silent. In fact, one might argue that distance must be seen as the key to an understanding of the epistemology of movement. Where Heywood can compensate for its potentially alienating effect by a plot which focuses the attention exclusively on the here and now of the lovers, other playwrights of the period find other means of dealing with it in their dramatic discourse. In the final section of this essay the discussion will focus on John Day’s adventure play The Travails of the Three English Brothers (1607). This crude dramatic adaptation of real events deals with the adventurous travel experiences of the three sons of the English politician Sir Thomas Shirley (1542- 1612). In its content, the play generally adheres to a travelogue entitled The Three English Brothers by Anthony Nixon which appeared slightly earlier in 1607. 19 With regard to the representation of space and movement on stage, Day’s play remains conventional: changes of scene mark shifts of setting. Movement is assumed by these shifts but not given particular attention. A chorus serves as a narrative instrument to tighten the extensive storyline and to facilitate the changes of place. In this way the play unfurls an almost confusing variety of activities on the part of the three brothers: Anthony Shirley (1565-1635? ) is shown in his role as an ambassador to the Persian and Spanish courts, Robert Shirley (? 1581-1628) appears as the military advisor to the Shah of Persia, and Thomas Shirley (1564-? 1630) enters the scene in the war against the Ottoman Empire and will be the only one among the brothers who is allowed to return to England. The individual scenes move from place to place and from brother to brother. The chorus connects the geographical expanse of the action - we witness the brothers travelling to Persia, Venice, Rome, Russia and Spain. Sandwiched between the narrative interventions of the chorus those events from the lives of the three brothers actually depicted on stage acquire exemplary significance. They offer John Day the opportunity to test and showcase a specifically English identity. The confrontations with other ethnicities, religions and nationalities - from Persian to Turkish to Italian and so on - serve to foreground a rather conventional English repertoire of differentiations. The play does not invest too much effort into hiding the fact that it is a kind of patriotic hagiography. The brothers serve as heroic vehicles for the propagation of features of Englishness which were destined to become part of English identity. From the stoic stamina of the Protestant faith in the face 19 Cf. Anthony Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), 7-8. The Stage Is Not Enough 107 of opposition to the technical superiority of the West, the whole arsenal of colonial chauvinism is present. 20 One may spare oneself the doubtful pleasure of dealing with these kinds of elements in this play in any more detail. At the end of the play, however, one encounters a peculiar scene: the three brothers are positioned in three different corners of the stage. Each of them holds a “prospective glass” - in this context most probably some kind of crystal ball - in his hands and seems to be able to discern his brothers in the instrument. 21 Enter three several ways the three Brothers, Robert with the state of Persia as before, Sir Anthonie, with the king of Spaine and others where he receives the order of Saint Iago, and other Offices, Sir Thomas in England with his Father and others. Fame gives each a prospective glass, they seeme to see one another, and offer to embrace, at which Fame parts them and so: Exeunt. In the quarto edition the stage directions explain this unusual pantomime in more detail: For the audience in the theatre the chorus provides the explanation of the strange action on stage: Into three parts deviding this our stage: They all at once shall take their leaves of you, Thinke this England, this Spaine, this Persia, Your favours then, to your observant eyes: Weele shewe their fortunes present qualities. This scene is as imaginative as it is clumsy. Nevertheless, the awkward conjunction of genius and daftness highlights the paradigmatic limitations for the representation of space and movement on stage. The division of the stage into three segments, which are supposed to depict Persia, Madrid and London, represents an almost desperate attempt to compensate by theatrical means for the spatial dimension of the play, as dictated by the historical and biographical pretexts. The prospective glasses which are introduced by John Day as instruments of communication pinpoint the difficulties contemporary dramatists encountered in the representation of the geographical expansion which challenged the worldview of early modern societies. The connotation of magic implied 20 One is reminded of the conventional armoury of a feeling of superiority, as it were, which Stephen Greenblatt has pinpointed to be the source of European colonial confidence: “The Europeans who ventured to the New World in the first decades after Columbus’s discovery shared a complex, well-developed, and, above all, mobile technology of power: writing, navigational instruments, ships, warhorses, attack dogs, effective armor, and highly lethal weapons, including gunpowder. Their culture was characterized by immense confidence in its own centrality” (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992 (1991)), 9. 21 In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe the protagonist also rescues a “prospective glass“ from the wreck. The editor of the 2010 Broadview edition of Defoe’s text assumes the uncommon instrument to be a telescope (Defoe 2010, 185 fn.). C HRISTOPH E HLAND 108 by the glasses bridges the distance which the history of the brothers’ international wanderings has created. In this context the theatrical problem of representing spatial-temporal simultaneity on stage is but secondary. The use of magic as the playwright’s last resort gives evidence of the fact that the problem of movement and mobility has - implicitly and possibly unconsciously - been recognised as one of uprootedness. At this very point the dramatic action is undercut by implicit doubt in the spatial order it has helped to create: once the action has moved the bodies of the three brothers with heroic gestures into a definite relational order to each other and to the depicted world, the dramatic argument begins to revolt against the logic of the inflicted separation. If movement throughout the play is propagated as heroic achievement, the final scene counteracts this message and unmasks propaganda for what it is. With regard to the early modern zeitgeist, John Day’s text is a particularly informative cultural specimen. Due to its sources it offers a case in which stage fiction is particularly closely dependent on the factual background of the lives of the protagonists. Since he cannot hide the effect of movement in a sentimental love story, as Heywood did, Day needs to find more than just a dramatic answer to the experience of distance and alienation created by mobility. His last scene visualises the potentially centrifugal forces of movement which affect literature and societies alike in the early modern period. As Day’s text exemplifies, not all authors manage to stabilise their epistemological apparatus against these centrifugal forces of movement. In the context of the discussion in this essay, however, it is precisely in these moments that the fissures caused by the force of mobility become visible under the surface of the text. Here one can detect the formation of a symbolic language of modernity, a language which will increasingly succeed in incorporating these horizons of experience in a new spatial and temporal logic. In fact, one can observe that the epistemological function of the static place is gradually transferred to movement itself. Anthony Giddens calls this “dis-location” the prime characteristic of modernity: [...] in pre-modern societies, space and place largely coincide, since the spatial dimensions of social life are, for most of the population, and in most respects, dominated by ‘presence’ - by localised activities. The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between absent others, locationally distant from any situation of face-to-face interaction. 22 Not least because of this “dis-location” one may note that constructions of identity in the early modern period will eventually be transferred from the place-bound collective to the dynamic, that is to say, the self-moving and self-defining Cartesian individual. At the end one remains with the imperative of movement which authors such as Thomas Heywood and John Day 22 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 18. The Stage Is Not Enough 109 had to struggle with. The subtle problems in their plays give evidence of the culturally strenuous process by which the identity of modern man defines his environment and not vice versa. C HRISTOPH E HLAND 110 Works Cited Bartolovich, Crystal. “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City.’” ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels. Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. London: Reaktion, 2000. 13- 26. Day, John. The Travails of the Three English Brothers. London: John Wright, 1607. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Evan R. Davis. Toronto: Broadview, 2010. Gibbons, Brian. “Romance and the Heroic Play.” The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. Ed. Albert R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 207-236. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. 1992. Cambridge, MA/ London: U of Harvard P, 1995. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. 1991. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992 (1991). Hadfield, Andrew, ed. Amazons, Savages & Machiavels - Travel & Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007. Heywood, Thomas. The Fair Maid of the West. Or, A Girl Worth Gold. The First Part. London: Richard Royston, 1631. Holland, Peter. “‘Travelling Hopefully’: The Dramatic Form of Journeys in English Renaissance Drama.” Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. Ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 160-178. Jones, John Henry. The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592. 1994. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Jowitt, Claire. Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Löw, Martina. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001. Mancall, Peter C. Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007. Parr, Anthony. Three Renaissance Travel Plays. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Rodger, N.A.M. The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649. 1998. London: Penguin, 2004. Shakespeare, William. The Life of King Henry the Fifth. Ed. T.W. Craik. London: Thomson, 2001. ---. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. Ed. Charles R. Forker. London: Thomson, 2002. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. An Age of Voyages, 1350-1600. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. T ILL K INZEL Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea: Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Daniel Defoe’s The King of Pirates and Mary Lacy’s The Female Shipwright Mobility is a crucial element of autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical texts. Particularly pseudo-autobiographical texts constantly blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between reality as perceived and objectified, making authenticating moves that are cancelled out by the texts’ fictions. In this paper, three fairly dissimilar authors will be discussed in order to provide a sketch of the varieties of mobility in the autobiographical mode of writing in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. The diaries of Samuel Pepys can be regarded as a paradigmatically mobile text in so far as the constant movements of Pepys about town provide the counterpoints to his acts of writing at home. Pepys, moving through the city of London in the interests of politics, business, or pleasure, as the case may be, presents to the reader the image of the bustling city itself, constantly evoking an image of mobility. This is extended to his naval interests and the few occasions where Pepys actually travelled on board ship. His naval experience, however, links his life and his life-writing to those who have written autobiographically or pseudoautobiographically about the seafaring element in, and its influence on, British life. In this essay I will look at Daniel Defoe before moving on to a rarely considered text. In order to highlight gender-related issues in connection with mobility, I want to compare and contrast Pepys’s male autobiographical mobility with the later female autobiography of Mary Lacy, who for many years served in the Royal Navy as a woman in men’s clothing, presenting a highly revealing account of the possibilities and constraints of female mobility in early modern seafaring Britain. Questions of fictionality and authenticity, as well as issues of the demarcation of public and private spaces and places, are intimately connected in these texts. Preliminary Considerations I: The Oceanography of Literature In connection with the problem of space it is quite remarkable to note that even though many theories of space are roughly speaking indebted to decon- T ILL K INZEL 112 structive, poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches, 1 there is an increasing awareness among scholars that literature is not merely a self-referential system but in some sense refers to the world and elements of it, albeit in the form of an aesthetic illusion of referring to the world by literary means 2 . Taking as her example the Vierwaldstättersee region in Switzerland, Barbara Piatti has demonstrated with a pathbreaking study on the “geography of literature” what kind of potential the surveying of an area’s literary geography has for the analysis of spatial models in literature. 3 With every text we read we complement the net we throw over the world, thereby creating virtual geographies which are, however, phantastically slanted shadows of a real world. Naval or maritime literature offers an interesting case study for gauging the fruitfulness of the approach called “geography of literature.“ 4 At the same time, the “geography of literature” offers the possibility to survey the limits of the references to the world that are introduced by geographical coordinates. These limits may have to do with the fact that the sea as the deterritorialized space is opposed to the land which can be enclosed in borders both virtually and in fact. The geography of literature has to turn into a kind of oceanography of literature (thalassography). This oceanography of literature has as its object the specific spatial imaginaries of maritime literature. The poetics of the ocean are meant to negotiate the interplay of referentialization and poeticization in maritime literature. The sea has to be considered as a space that has been surveyed in fictions and that fictions continue to survey. And it is most important in connection with the study of mobility, its patterns and irregularities, for the sea as such puts in continual motion the literary characters of maritime literature, both fictional and non-fictional. 5 The opposition and tension of land and sea is the topic of a famous idiosyncratic book by Carl Schmitt. In his Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung, seiner Tochter Anima erzählt, he presents a ‘world historical’ thesis concerning the relationship of land and sea in the English cultural imagination, even though he does not use this term. Schmitt’s text narrates in a very 1 Cf. the general drift of the Metzler handbook on space in this matter: Raum ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stephan Günzel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010). 2 Cf. Ansgar Nünning, “Welten - Weltbilder - Weisen der Welterzeugung: Zum Wissen der Literatur und zur Aufgabe der Literaturwissenschaft,“ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 59 (2009): 66. 3 Barbara Piatti, Die Geographie der Literatur. Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 15-121. 4 Note the distinctions in literary concepts of space concerning geopoetics introduced by Sylvia Sasse, “Poetischer Raum: Chronotopos und Geopoetik,” Raum ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stephan Günzel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 294-308. 5 This specifically maritime aspect of space and mobility is only marginally present in Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, eds. Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 113 lively way the stories of pirates and whale hunters. 6 But the most relevant comment he makes concerns the rise of England as a naval power, a topic that seems to go on spawning books endlessly. Schmitt claims, quite poetically, that under Queen Elizabeth I, the English transformed themselves from a people of shepherds to a sea-roaming nation of privateers, into “children of the sea.” 7 The English made use of the technological achievements of the Portuguese, and maritime literature with its many movements would not have come into existence without the compass and other instruments of navigation. 8 Schmitt 9 The conflict of the colonial powers of Portugal, the Netherlands and England is mirrored in ideological texts in the first half of the 17 th century when the debate about the free or open versus the closed sea was launched - mare liberum or mare clausum. The Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius defended the freedom of the seas in his 100-page treatise Mare liberum (which was anonymously published in 1609; it consisted of a chapter of a much longer treatise De jure praedae). Grotius provided a philosophical defense of the business interests of the Dutch in the East Asian world region. In this world-historical constellation, ships and the sea quickly became subjects of intense public interest, as N.A.M. Rodger writes, and thus became “symbols of national identity.” draws attention to the close connection of maritime existence, which is, of course, an existence of mobility in the new spatial dimensions of modernity, with the unleashing of technological progress. But how this translates into the description of ships and their spatial capabilities would need to be considered in more detail than is possible here. 10 From the point of view of the scholar of English literature it was important that “[m]any literate and even learned men went to sea themselves, while the literacy of the professional seamen (not only the élite of navigators) was itself improving very rapidly”. 11 6 Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer (Köln-Lövenich: Edition Maschke, 1981). See Claus-Artur Scheier, “Zwischen Land und Meer. Philosophische Bemerkungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der See ausgehend von Carl Schmitt,” Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft. Band LIV (Braunschweig: 2005), 251-263; Till Kinzel, “Benjamin Disraeli and Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,” Anglistentag Proceedings Münster 2007, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer (Trier: WVT, 2008), 401-411. 7 Schmitt, 1981, 50. 8 Daniel Defoe, A General History of Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1999), 177. On the role of technological and logistical achievements of the Portuguese, see also Daniel Damler, Wildes Recht. Zur Pathogenese des Effektivitätsprinzips in der neuzeitlichen Eigentumslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ²2010), 56-62. 9 Carl Schmitt, Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber / Gespräch über den Neuen Raum (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), 55. 10 N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea. A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (New York, London: Norton, 1998), 311. 11 Rodger 1998, 311. T ILL K INZEL 114 The decisive response to Grotius followed in the 1630s with John Selden’s Mare clausum (a text that had in fact been written much earlier). 12 Preliminary Considerations II: Mobile Lives in the 17 th and 18 th Centuries Selden propagated the idea of an English sphere of interest in the waters belonging to England, but this was mainly an argument connected to fishing rights. The following period of maritime conflict and colonial expansion presented the spectacle of the fight between an open sea for all or a closed sea controlled by some. This, of course, would be of crucial significance for the patterns of mobility in all kinds of maritime texts. Pepys provides one of the most famous accounts of a scenario in which both mobility and its constraints become obvious. This account concerns the movements of the King returning from his exile on the continent to England. The king’s mobility is in the focus of some of the early entries in Pepys’s diary in a direct and indirect form. In May 1660, Pepys met the king, Charles II, for the first time - and he met him on board ship. Pepys reports on the 21 st of May 1660 that the King is expected on board every day, and on the 23 rd of May he actually came on board. 13 Where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through. As his travelling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to his knees in dirt, with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on and a pair of country shoes, that made him so sore all over his feet that he could scarce stir. It was on this occasion that the King related his own adventures of mobility, namely of his escape from Worcester: Yet he was forced to run away from a miller and other company that took them for rogues. […] In another place, at his Inn, the master of the house, as the King was standing with his hands upon the back of a chair by the fire-side, he kneeled down and kissed his hand privately, saying that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going. Then the difficulty of getting a boat to get into France, where he was fain to plot with the master thereof to keep his design from the four men and a boy (which was all his ship’s company), and so got to Feckam in France. 14 The King recounts his volatile situation on his escape, being recognized by some of his subjects who do not give him away. The narration presents the King on the move who is also perceived to be on the move - and he tells this 12 See Mónica Brito Vieira, “Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s Debate on Dominion over the Seas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64/ 3 (July 2003). 13 Samuel Pepys, The Diary. A New and Complete Transcription, eds. Robert Latham and William Matthews, vol. I (London: Bell & Sons, 1970), 154. 14 Pepys 1970, 156. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 115 story at the very moment that he is retracing his steps to England. A tale of mobility foreshadows the return to his realm and thus also metaphorically a return to stability. Before the King reaches English land, however, he seems to have experienced a particular restraint on his mobility on board ship that was also noted by Pepys. For Pepys was ordered by his master “to cause the marke to be gilded, and a Crowne and C. R. to be made at the head of the coach table,” 15 How does he describe this event that would, in its way, contribute to another form of mobility, namely Pepys’s upward mobility with the help of Edward Montagu, finally reaching its high point in his career as the chief administrator of the Royal Navy. where the King had obviously “caught his head against a beam,” as the commentary to this diary entry surmises. 16 Pepys’s considerable role in the development of the Royal Navy in the Restoration period is standard knowledge of all naval historians. But Pepys only published one book on the topic during his lifetime, his Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England (1690). Pepys achieved his eminent position in the administration of the Navy without any significant qualifications to start with. But he acquired a comprehensive knowledge of all things connected to navy life, which provided the crucial wherewithal for becoming a competent administrator, knowing the precise details of countless problems of logistics. Pepys’s upward mobility and his competent management of navy affairs in turn contributed to the overall mobility of British imperial policies. For it was the Royal Navy, at least according to historian Arthur Herman, 17 which to a large extent created the modern world which laid the foundations for our own post-imperial world after the demise of the British empire. British imperialism as a cultural phenomenon is intimately connected to this organization of the navy that encapsulates the coincidentia oppositorum of movement and fixity, of mobility and stability. Only this combination would ensure the safety of England’s status as a world power, even though one of its initial tasks was nothing less than providing protection and help to the English merchant fleet. 18 Mobility, for Pepys, had many different dimensions. One of these was the power to move other people, to make them move, as he writes on 20 April 1660: “All the morning I was busy to get my window altered and to have my table set as I would have it; which after it was done, I was infinitely pleased 15 Pepys 1970, 159. 16 Cf. C.S. Knighton, Pepys and the Navy (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003); J.D. Davies, Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689 (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2008). 17 Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves. How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 18 See Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Abacus, 1998), 29; Peter Wende, Das britische Empire. Geschichte eines Weltreiches (München: Beck, ²2009), 75. T ILL K INZEL 116 with it, and also to see what a command I have to have everyone ready to come and go at my command.” 19 Samuel Pepys’s Movements in and out of Town: Upward, Urban, and Naval Mobility Autobiography as a genre is here rather broadly conceived. In my conceptual libertinism I include diaries and pseudo-autobiographies: diaries of the kind Pepys wrote come close to what their authors might have wished to be read as their own account of their lives so that a kind of reader-response oriented genre definition might allow us to read the diaries as autobiography. Certainly the diary entries provide the reader with the chance and necessity to extrapolate some kind of identity - that of Samuel Pepys - as a fixed focalizer through whose eyes we follow the writer’s movements through the city. In fact, autobiography, if not merely a document of internal musings and meditations, in its extreme form bordering on or identical with mysticism, offers images of movements. Autobiography is the record of the movements, in actual existence, through spaces and places that are really there but acquire a particular significance through their descriptions in autobiographical texts. Autobiography comes into being through mobility; mere unchallenged immobility does not trigger the writing of autobiography. Autobiography records movements that provide the external impulse to give the text something like eventfulness. Most particularly, it is the turbulent and boisterous city of London that provides the spatial background for the everyday mobility of Pepys. 20 Up and to the office, where we sat all morning. At noon home to dinner. Then to my office and there waited, thinking to have had Bagwell’s wife come to me about business, that I might have talked with her; but she came not. So I to Whitehall by coach with Mr. Andrews; and there I got his contract for the victualling of Tanger signed and sealed by us there. So that all that business is well over, and I hope to have made a good business of it […]. Thence to W. Joyce and Anthonys to invite them to dinner to meet my aunt James at my house. So home, having called upon Doll, our pretty Change woman, […]. So going home and my coach stopping in Newgate market over against a poulterer’s shop, I took occasion to buy a rabbit; but it proved a deadly old one when I came to eat it - as I did do after an hour’s In the case of Pepys, one can open the diary on almost every page and will find something very much like this, as e.g. on 6 September 1664: 19 Samuel Pepys, The Diary. A Selection, ed. Robert Latham (London: Penguin, 2003), 36. 20 Cf. the background descriptions in Stephen Porter, Pepys’s London: Everyday Life in London 1650-1703 (Stroud: Amberley, 2011). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 117 being at my office; and after supper, again there till past 11 at night. And so home and to bed. 21 This passage, which is similar to many others in the diary, highlights the two fixed places between which Pepys regularly moves back and forth: his home and his office. In between staying at home and working at the office, he moves about London on various errands, not all of them connected to his duties at the Admiralty. Cynthia Wall 22 succinctly captures the essence of Pepys’s diary entries with regard to the spatial dimensions of London, implicitly including issues of mobility. She writes: “Pepys itemises his spaces, measuring his day through the streets of the city; his routes can be traced from his words. London has a very physical texture in Pepys’s diary […].” Wall speaks of Pepys’s “urban patterns out and about,” highlighting a passage in Pepys’s diary from October 1664 that is “a collage of intersections and interactions: traffic stopping and starting, coaches lost and found, taverns mentioned and entered, patterns of light and dark.” 23 Pepys’s diary consists of a myriad of mini-stories, and many of these mini-stories have to do with mobility and the conditions of mobility. The many spaces through which Pepys moves and the places to which he goes are the referential basis for his mini-stories, but they do not remain completely stable. Pepys’s mobility in the city of London does not just refer to a London that remained unchanged while he was writing his diary. In fact, the city itself was in movement, and most particularly so when the great conflagration of 1666 destroyed vast areas of the city, leaving room for the wholly or partially new construction of places, spaces, buildings and thoroughfares. As Pepys moves through this mobile city his diary tries to keep track of the changes. It is surely no accident that the terms of mobility are so prominent in this passage. Pepys does not, of course, always mention the means of transportation, for he sometimes walks, takes a coach or travels by boat. The image of Pepys conjured up by many diary entries is of someone almost constantly on the move but coming back to the same places again and again. The spreading of the fire and the mobility enforced by it are documented by Pepys in his diary entry of 2 September 1666, from which I quote the following excerpt: So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower and there got upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinsons little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this 21 Pepys 2003, 422. 22 Cynthia Wall, “London and Narration in the Long Eighteenth Century,” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London, ed. Lawrence Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 108. 23 Wall 2011, 109. T ILL K INZEL 118 and the other side the end of the bridge - which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the Bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s bakers house in Pudding lane, and that it hath burned down St. Magnes Church and most part of Fishstreete already. So I down to the waterside and there got a boat and through the bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michells house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way and the fire running further, that in a very little time got as far as the Stillyard while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the River or bringing them into lighters that lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering from one pair of stair by the waterside to another. An among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. 24 In this famous passage, mobility and immobility are closely intertwined on various levels. Not only is Pepys moving about the area to better observe the fire; he also stays in some places in order to make his observations. These observations, in their turn, yield further instances of both mobility and immobility. People not wanting to leave the property cling to their place as long as possible before removing their possessions under the immediate threat from the fire. Patterns of mobility thus also turn out to be patterns of immobility for both men and goods. But also the animal world is implicated in this strange scenario, as pigeons show the same tendency not to give up their place of abode until it is, at least in some cases, too late. It is this image that stays with the reader, offering the possibility of a symbolic interpretation of the conflagration. Fictions of Autobiography: Daniel Defoe’s Pirates The close connections between culture and technology as a means to achieve maximum mobility are particularly apparent in the context of English sea literature. For literature of this kind is based on the experiences which are enabled by the technologies of seafaring, but it is also the case that the technologies employed in seafaring ventures and adventures come to light for us in the medium of literature. The focus on autobiographical literature in this essay already indicates that the issue of the authenticity of these texts distinguishes autobiographies from mere fictions which do not claim to be true. But even though actual travel reports and other sources can be regarded as reports on the British sea experience, fictional autobiographies help to create a more comprehensive picture of the seafaring experience in the cultural imaginary. 24 Pepys 2003, 660. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 119 This cultural imaginary makes the distinction between fiction and nonfiction particularly problematic, as autobiographical texts may either be authentic autobiographies or inauthentic, i.e. fictional autobiographies. This brings us to Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), the versatile journalist and author who was also a long-time student of naval matters and particularly piracy. 25 Though it remains doubtful whether the General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 under the name of Charles Johnson, was actually written by Defoe, as some scholars claim, 26 Defoe offers his own take on piratical adventures in a number of other texts that offer highly interesting material for the analysis of early modern (fictional) patterns of mobility. Piracy as such depends on mobility, of course, and to understand piratical patterns of mobility would have greatly increased the operational ability of those who wanted to keep piracy under control. 27 Piracy also profited from the opening up of the oceans of the world beginning with the 16 th century. For from then on the open sea, as Michael Kempe 28 The early 18 th century has often been called the Golden Age of piracy, which would appear to be somewhat problematic in light of the often brutal piratical practices. At the time, however, there was a whole range of different forms of piracy (pirates, buccaneers, corsairs, freebooters, privateers) which were sometimes difficult to entangle, even though the laws of nation stipulated that they should not all be treated in the same way. remarks, was transformed into a transnational space of contacts and conflicts to a hitherto unknown degree. 29 For some roamed the seas in possession of official ‘letters of marque,’ but there were also pirates who owned letters of marque issued by non-existent governments or of governments who did not know anything about the existence of the respective letters of marque. Pirates had already been considered as hostis humani generis by Cicero, as enemies of the human species. 30 25 Cf. Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe. Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). This notion was widespread in the 17 th and early 18 th centuries but should not be misconstrued as a 26 Wolfgang Riehle, Daniel Defoe (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002), 88, accepts the attribution to Defoe. Whether Schonhorn’s attribution of the book to Daniel Defoe is correct is open to doubt (cf. 709-712). Cf. Robert Bohn, Die Piraten (München: Beck, ³2007), 7f. See also Joachim Möller, “Defoes Piratenparadies Libertalia,“ AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 8 (1983): 129-144. 27 On piracy see the succinct introduction by Bohn ³2007; the classic book, to which Carl Schmitt repeatedly draws attention, is: Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (New York: Dover, 2007). Cf. as well Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All. Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone Books, 2009); and the indispensable volume by Michael Kempe, Fluch der Meere. Piraterie, Völkerrecht und internationale Beziehungen 1500-1800 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010). 28 Kempe, 2010, 16. 29 See Kempe 2010. 30 Defoe 1999, 377. T ILL K INZEL 120 proper definition of the pirate but rather as polemical characterization in moral and legal terms. 31 Defoe frequently wrote in the genre of what could be called inauthentic autobiography, a kind of autobiography purporting to be authentic. 32 There are relatively few truly good authors of actually authentic autobiographies connected to the life of the sea. This is most likely due to the fact that only very few people with true literary talent went to sea. Famous authors like Melville and Smollett are merely the exceptions to the rule. Interestingly, even authors of literary talent more often chose the road of fiction than of autobiography in their attempts to depict naval themes in literature. It was the drive towards fictionalization that would come to characterize the English literature of the sea. 33 Daniel Defoe wrote one such fictional autobiography in the rather slim but highly interesting volume called The King of Pirates: Being an Account of the Enterprises of Captain Avery, The Mock King of Madagascar, first published in 1720, reporting on the odyssey and the excursions of crime and rape of pirates from the point of view of a pirate captain. This text can be regarded as a “proleptic sketch“ for Captain Singleton 34 and provides a lively account of the pirates’ movements across the oceans but the most interesting passages are perhaps those that more allude to than describe in detail the rough dealings in which the pirates engaged. These passages systematically refuse to ascribe clear responsibility for piratical atrocities and can be regarded as early examples of unreliable narration. 35 In his text, Defoe draws on the case of the famous or infamous pirate captain Henry Avery, whose life already provided the basis of the 1713 play The Successful Pyrate by someone called Charles Johnson (most probably not the same as the author of the General History of Pyrates). 36 31 Cf., with reference to Matthew Tindall, Kempe 2010, 159; Heller-Roazen 2009, 93-118. Avery’s fictional autobiography as written by Defoe sets out to counter-act the claims made by another (fictive) book purporting to be Avery’s autobiography entitled My Life and Adventures; however, this alleged pseudo-autobiography was not actually known to Defoe’s fictional Avery - he had merely heard a report about it - mobility of news not yet also being a mobility of goods, e.g. of books. Defoe’s Avery thus writes his own account in response to an equally fictitious pre-text which is only present through its curiously emphasized absence; Defoe’s Avery, in fact, corrects what did not really stand in need of correction, thus contributing to the game of literary processes of authentification, inventing a kind of fake intertextuality. There 32 Cf. Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage. Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 187. 33 Cf. Edwards 1994, 219. 34 Novak 2000, 580. 35 Cf. Novak 2000, 581-582. 36 Cf. Gosse 2007, 178. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 121 are many fine touches of irony in The King of Pirates, most particularly when Avery tells the story of a Catholic friar who begs the pirates to return a silver plate because it had been consecrated to the Virgin - “as it happens,” Avery remarks laconically, “he could not persuade us to it.” 37 In this case, the pirates turn out to be immobile; they cannot be moved by theological reasoning or appeals to the sacredness of material objects which, due to this very materiality, also have a completely non-religious significance. But more to the point: in another context, Avery underscores the mobility of moral judgements or norms when he points to possible parallels between empires and pirate communities. St. Augustine had already famously drawn parallels between states and bands of robbers; and early modern scholars of the law of nations such as Grotius had clearly acknowledged the possibility for criminal organisations to turn into lawful communities, thus providing a legal rationale for accepting the existence of pirate republics. 38 If any gang of pirates or buccaneers would go upon their adventuers, and when they had made themselves rich would come and settle with us, we would take them into our protection and give them land to build towns and habitations for themselves - and so in time we might become a great nation, and inhabit the whole island. I told them that the Romans themselves were, at first, no better than such a gang of rovers as we were, and who knew bout our General, Captain Avery, might lay the foundation of as great an empire as they. Avery, disguising his true identity, tells two prisoners how such a state might come into being: 39 It has to be acknowledged that Avery spoke these words in order to deceive the prisoners about their actual strength and ambitions, intending to send forth into the world “rodomontading stories” inducing fear of the pirates among the English and Dutch ships travelling near Madagascar. 40 In addition, the actual possibility of founding any kind of empire was slim, to say the least, due to the decreasing number of men. However, Avery’s argument contains a serious core by pointing to the origins in violence of respectable political communities which can offer the protection or security that plays such an important role in Hobbes’s political philosophy. Hobbes had also considered the possibility of robbers in the state of nature being transformed into acceptable communities, 41 Political empires such as that of the Romans are, at least initially, morally on the same level as pirates and robbers, acquiring legitimacy not by any although these Hobbesian robbers are distinguished from actual pirates by refraining from killing anyone. 37 Daniel Defoe, The King of Pirates, foreword by Peter Ackroyd (London: Hesperus, 2002), 24. 38 Kempe 2010, 237. 39 Defoe 2002, 75. 40 Defoe 2002, 75. 41 Hobbes, De Cive 5.2; Kempe 2010, 236. T ILL K INZEL 122 grand notions of morality and justice but simply by success. This success, though, would have to be based less on mobility than on stability, as the key term ‘settle’ in the quoted passage indicates. The pirates are, however, unable to settle down, so that the first part of The King of Pirates rather aptly ends on a note of mobility, with Avery detailing his travel plans via Constantinople back to the sphere of Christendom. 42 This story of Avery was, however, not exactly the most useful one for Defoe to appropriate and adapt. The well-known fact that documentary evidence on Avery existed kept Defoe from freely indulging in imaginary exploits and thus purely fictional mobility - there were always people who might want to check the true facts of the story against his acts of storytelling. Shortly after publishing The King of Pirates, Defoe therefore made another attempt at the description of piratical mobility in his novel (also purporting to be an autobiography) The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton from 1720. This novel takes up the game of “authenticating the unauthentic” 43 and has as one of its themes piracy as a form of unscrupulous original accumulation of riches through unproductive means. 44 Defoe’s novel already bears all the traits of the pirate mythology, in which the criminal character of the pirates’ actions becomes clear enough. But there is also ample evidence of the bravery and the naval skills on often completely insufficient vessels. Finally, the pirates in Captain Singleton’s narrative amass precisely those treasures of doubloons and gold peseta that would occupy the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson and many lesser writers almost two hundred years later, with sustained pop-cultural effects. In the course of his narration, Defoe’s autodiegetic narrator Bob Singleton - who, in fact, composes the whole book as one long autobiographical letter - in the course of his narration attains more and more distance from his loathsome piratical existence; he moves away from being a pirate under the influence of a Quaker who turns out, again and again, to be an interpreter of natural law or natural right when the pirates come into contact with other peoples. Natural law is a conception of law that offers general moral guidance - and particularly so, one would hope, in a world in movement, for the general assumption of natural law is as follows: whereas social and political conditions change all the time and from one territory to the next, the principles of natural law supposedly are immune to change and are true or valid always and everywhere. 45 42 Defoe 2002, 76. But 43 Sutherland in Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, introduction by James Sutherland (London: Dent, 1963), v. 44 See on this novel the instructive reading by Oliver Lindner, “Matters of Blood.” Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), 161-191, which focusses on the issue of violence. 45 On Defoe’s views concerning the laws of nature, see Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 123 would not the pirates offer a prime example of moveable morality, as it were, of moral principles that do not stay the same but change according to the necessities imposed on the pirates by their mobility? In Captain Singleton, we learn at one point that the crew had behaved somewhat too freely towards the women of a settlement on the coast. This was received with some hostility by their husbands, who went on to offer violence to the intruders. The pirates, in their turn, were so enraged about these actions that they were planning to kill all the inhabitants of the settlement. (Being enraged is properly understood as a moral reaction based on a perceived case of injustice.) But before they could do so, it was pointed out to them by William, the Quaker, that under similar conditions they would according to the laws of nature have reacted in the same way. This did in fact reduce the violence, though perhaps not as much as one would have liked to think, for the massacre was then merely kept within certain limits. Natural law, as this case shows, has a real but limited power to move people in their actions - and even pirates as one of the most mobile groups of people can be persuaded to be moved by moral considerations. As there is no fixed authority, such as a Hobbesian state, however, these considerations extend only so far - and one further has to note that even the “laws of nature” do not operate by means of nature alone; they are in need of being brought into mind, of being articulated, by language and reason. Reasoned speech has to come to nature’s aid but cannot guarantee inflexible and immobile moral standards. The lack of moral orientation on the part of the pirates is the mirror image of the pirates’ spatial dislocation and their aimless mobility (roving). Singleton offers the following pertinent evaluation of their situation, a description that is emblematic of the pirates’ life as a life of mobility: “[...] we were as miserable as Nature could well make us to be; for we were upon a Voyage and no Voyage, we were bound some where and no where; for tho’ we knew what we intended to do, we did really not know what we were doing [...].” 46 Pirates such as Captain Singleton, who wants to make the reader believe that he gradually became disaffected with his way of life, had to navigate carefully in various senses. First of all, they had to navigate between the Dutch and the Portuguese, who were at the time fighting over the right to engage in trade in certain areas between Africa and Asia. As there was neither free trade nor free sea at the time, movements had to be carefully considered, since miscalculations in this matter could easily lead to the disruption of the pirates’ (or others’) entire business operations. A major logistical problem for pirates like Bob Singleton consisted in selling off the enormous amounts of nutmegs and cloves in order to amass even more gold than before. Defoe’s novels, and especially the ‘autobiography’ of Captain Singleton, can be read as fictionalizing comments on the conflicts and controversies 46 Defoe 1963, 39. T ILL K INZEL 124 concerning the law of nations in the early modern period of expanding business mobility. This conflict - also taken up much later in a sort of historical novel by Captain Marryat, namely The Phantom Ship - was a quarrel between two notions which have a direct connection to issues of mobility—the free (open) or closed sea. This conflict dating back to the 17 th century was the expression, on the level of legal thinking and/ or propaganda, as the case may be, of the necessity to define spheres of interest and to delimit the acceptable movements of enemy forces and especially merchant fleets on the oceans. Interestingly, the English sided with the notion developed by the Portuguese scholar Freitas, arguing for a mare clausum, whereas the Dutch endorsed the position developed by Hugo Grotius, arguing for a mare liberum, which accorded much better with their trade interests. 47 Gender and Mobility in Naval Contexts: The Female Shipwright and the Lady Tars Within this context of rivalling empires of merchant fleets, the pirates had to adapt their movements so that crucial problems of logistics could be solved, such as the storing of provision, the establishment of safe-havens, and the detection of booty. In a naval context, gender issues become particularly pertinent, as life on board ship is often depicted as an overwhelmingly male space. It may very well be true that much maritime fiction holds few charms for female readers because of the lack of proper female characters over large swathes of storytelling. It therefore seems highly interesting to take a closer look at those texts that actually portray female life within a naval context. Three texts of unequal length stand out: Mary Lacy’s The Female Shipwright, The Female Soldier or The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell, and Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot. As the value of these texts considered as historical sources differs, 48 47 On Grotius and Dutch colonial policies see Daniel Damler, Wildes Recht. Zur Pathogenese des Effektivitätsprinzips in der neuzeitlichen Eigentumslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ²2010), 74-83. I will here concentrate on the comparatively long text by Mary Lacy that is usually regarded as the most or even the only reliable autobiographical report on female life in the navy. Regardless of the actual truth value of everything she presents in the book, the text offers some intriguing material for the study of gender mobility in the middle of the 18 th century. Mary Lacy’s autobiography was first published in 1773, then at least 48 Cf. Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London: Constable, 1996), 102; 107-110; Hannah Snell et al., The Lady Tars: The Autobiographies of Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy and Mary Ann Talbot (Tucson: Fireship Press, 2008). Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 125 three times reprinted in abridged form in the 19 th century, 49 only to be forgotten until fairly recently. 50 Lacy 51 characterized herself as “being of a roving disposition”: “I never liked to be within doors,” thereby foreshadowing her running away in man’s clothing and establishing personality traits as the presumed cause of her patterns of mobility. It seems, however, that she did not at first plan to join the navy in any capacity whatsoever: “[...] a thought came into my head to dress myself in mens apparel, and set off by myself; but where to go, I did not know, nor what - I was to do when I was gone”. 52 Conclusion: Converging and Diverging Patterns of Mobility Her inclination to leave home sets in motion her desire to decamp at the next best opportunity, for which she prepares by procuring men’s clothing. By doing so she performs her clear knowledge that it is easier to move away from home by crossdressing; after her experiences as a cross-dressed shipwright, however, Lacy, at least according to the account in her autobiography, returns to the normal order of things, leading a life that remains unrecorded. The mobility of her life as a shipwright turns out to lead to the haven of marriage. Samuel Pepys’s diary can be considered as a prime example of autobiography as a record of mobility. Mobility is almost everywhere in Pepys’s diary but also in his environment. The bustling city as well as, to a lesser extent, the sailing ships of the Royal Navy serve as backdrops to a career that can be said to mirror the complex movements on all levels of society - in politics, economics, religion, military strategy - and literature. Defoe extends the realm of autobiography as a recording of self-related movements to fictional or fictionalized accounts of pirates moving about an unstable world as long as they are pirates, but then also trying to move into positions of respectable merchants, or at least “appearing as merchants” 53 49 Stark 1996, 123-124. and selling off their cargoes. Ironically, however, the end of their status as pirates does not signify an end to their mobility. From Isfahan, the King of Pirates contemplates going home through Muscovy, but this experienced pirate is surprisingly wary of the proposed route “by the Caspian Sea and Astrakhan“ due to “the barbarity of the Russians, the dangerous navigation of the Caspian Sea […], the hazard of being robbed by the Tartars on the River Volga […].” Nor was the actual route of travel chosen instead - the 50 One of the most recent reprints of the text by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich seems to have had limited appeal, as the books were quickly sold off for a bargain. 51 Lacy 2008, 16. 52 Lacy 2008, 18-19. 53 Defoe 2002, 86. T ILL K INZEL 126 road to Constantinople - less dangerous; in fact, the “many sorts of barbarians“ encountered on this journey made Avery consider that he “would run any kind of hazards by sea” before attempting such a journey again. 54 Once having reached Constantinople, where the alleged autobiographer resides at the time of writing, he is still plotting to go somewhere else, to Marseilles, and thence “to some inland town, where, as they have perhaps no notion of the sea, so they will not be inquisitive after us”. 55 Mary Lacy, on the other hand, demonstrates a quite different form of mobility. As a woman she was not predestined for a career in the Royal Navy but by keeping her gender identity hidden she managed to engage in activities that were considered a male domain. Her mobility, however, is arrested once she is recognized as a female. The last pieces of information provided by Mary Lacy in her autobiography all point to stability rather than mobility: First of all, she presents a petition to the Admiralty, receiving a £ 20 annuity “for which, as in gratitude and duty bound, I shall pray for them as long as I live.” The goal of Avery’s mobility would thus seem to be not only the ultimate cancellation of mobility but also the cancellation of all things connected to the prototypically mobile space, the sea. 56 In addition to the stability provided by regular payments of this sort, Lacy also left behind the potentially disruptive cross-dressing behaviour by marrying a Mr. Slade. Again, Lacy emphasizes notions of stability and continuity rather than mobility by referring to “the utmost happiness” of the married state she now enjoys as well as to her “most sanguine hopes of continuance” in this state. 57 Autobiographies and fictional autobiographies as texts of mobility offer a highly rewarding perspective on early modern patterns of mobility, since they dramatize a complex range of different reactions to lives at sea. I do not want to make any claims here about some kind of evolutionary pattern on the basis of the few autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical texts presented and examined here. The texts should rather be read as instantiations of patterns of mobility in particular settings, acquiring their characteristic features as much by the larger historical context as by the genre specifications to which they adhere. The texts by Pepys, Defoe and Lacy all demonstrate that mobility is a key structural feature of early modern English autobiography. Whereas Pepys is mostly, though not exclusively, concerned with mobility on land, Defoe and Lacy point towards the precipitation of mobility through the cultures of seafaring. What is imaginatively linked to the seascapes and the patterns of mobility in early modernity becomes part of 54 Defoe 2002, 86. 55 Defoe 2002, 87. 56 Lacy 2008, 168. 57 Lacy 2008, 169. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 127 the national identity of the English. At the same time, however, we should also not forget that despite our current emphasis on mobility some notions and cultural patterns developed in the early modern period were surprisingly stable. T ILL K INZEL 128 Works Cited Bohn, Robert. Die Piraten. München: Beck, 2007. Brito Vieira, Mónica. “Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden’s Debate on Dominion over the Seas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64/ 3 (July 2003): 361-377. Damler, Daniel. Wildes Recht. Zur Pathogenese des Effektivitätsprinzips in der neuzeitlichen Eigentumslehre. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010. Davies, J.D. Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689. Barnsley: Seaforth, 2008. Defoe, Daniel. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton. Introduction by James Sutherland. London: Dent, 1963. ---. A General History of Pyrates. Ed. Manuel Schonhorn. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1999. ---. The King of Pirates. Foreword by Peter Ackroyd. London: Hesperus, 2002. Edwards, Philip. The Story of the Voyage. Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Gosse, Philip. The History of Piracy. New York: Dover, 2007. Günzel, Stephan, ed. Raum ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010. Hallet, Wolfgang, and Birgit Neumann, eds. Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Enemy of All. Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books, 2009. Herman, Arthur. To Rule the Waves. How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. James, Lawrence. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus, 1998. Kempe, Michael. Fluch der Meere. Piraterie, Völkerrecht und internationale Beziehungen 1500-1800. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010. Kinzel, Till. “Benjamin Disraeli and Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology.” Anglistentag Proceedings Münster 2007. Ed. Klaus Stierstorfer. Trier: WVT, 2008. 401-411. Knighton, C.S. Pepys and the Navy. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003. Lacy, Mary. The History of the Female Shipwright. London: National Maritime Museum, 2008. Lindner, Oliver. “Matters of Blood.” Defoe and the Cultures of Violence. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Möller, Joachim. „Defoes Piratenparadies Libertalia.“ AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 8 (1983): 129-144. Novak, Maximillian E. Defoe. Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. ---. Defoe and the Nature of Man, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963. Nünning, Ansgar. “Welten - Weltbilder - Weisen der Welterzeugung: Zum Wissen der Literatur und zur Aufgabe der Literaturwissenschaft.“ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 59 (2009): 65-80. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary. A Selection. Ed. Robert Latham, London: Penguin, 2003. ---. The Diary. A New and Complete Transcription. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. Vol. I. London: Bell & Sons, 1970. Piatti, Barbara. Die Geographie der Literatur. Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Mobility and Autobiography on Land and Sea 129 Porter, Stephen. Pepys’s London: Everyday Life in London 1650-1703. Stroud: Amberley, 2011. Riehle, Wolfgang. Daniel Defoe. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002. Rodger, N.A.M. The Safeguard of the Sea. A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649. New York, London: Norton, 1998. Sasse, Sylvia. “Poetischer Raum: Chronotopos und Geopoetik.” Raum ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Stephan Günzel. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010. 294-308. Scheier, Claus-Artur. “Zwischen Land und Meer. Philosophische Bemerkungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der See ausgehend von Carl Schmitt.” Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft. LIV. Braunschweig: 2005. 251- 263. Schmitt, Carl. Gespräch über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber / Gespräch über den Neuen Raum. Berlin: Akademie, 1994. ---. Land und Meer. Köln-Lövenich: Edition Maschke, 1981. Snell, Hannah et al. The Lady Tars: The Autobiographies of Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy and Mary Ann Talbot. Tucson: Fireship Press, 2008. Stark, Suzanne J. Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail. London: Constable, 1996. Tomalin, Claire. Samuel Pepys. The Unequalled Self. New York: Vintage, 2003. Wall, Cynthia. “London and Narration in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Ed. Lawrence Manley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 102-118. Wende, Peter. Das britische Empire. Geschichte eines Weltreiches. München: Beck, 2009. II. Mob and Mobility: Migrant Fictions in the 18 th Century S TEPHAN K OHL Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers and the Idea of the Nation 1 Introduction In The Handbook of New Media, Curry claims that there is an “interconnection between the technologies available for communication […] and the ways in which people have conceptualized space and place.” 1 The typology of perception employed opposes vertical and horizontal space, notions developed by Yi-Fu Tuan. Vertical space positions a place in a hierarchy of authorities whereas horizontal space is structured by lines of communication. It is the purpose of this paper to explore this ‘interconnection’ during the transport revolution in 18 th century Britain by comparing domestic ‘Tours’ composed in the first quarter of the century with ‘Tours’ written in the 1770s. 2 Under the impact of an improved transport infrastructure, the traditional idea of vertical space was being challenged in 18 th -century Britain by a mental image of the nation as a web of roads and waterways, a horizontal concept of the nation. The perception of space as either vertical or horizontal has implications for the concept of the nation and as writers of domestic tours had to make a decision on a vertical or horizontal representation of the land, they were involved in the contemporary construction of the British nation. Their task was made all the more difficult as the Act of Union of 1707 made it necessary to replace the notion of an English nation by a concept of Britishness. 3 The task of redefining nationhood coincided with the mid-century transport revolution. Considering the road system only, conditions improved substantially after 1707, when turnpike trusts came into existence: they all built new and upgraded existing highways. Between 1725 and 1770, the number of turnpike miles rose from less than 2,000 to nearly 15,000, 4 1 Michael R. Curry, “Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place,” The Handbook of New Media, ed. Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2002), 502. with the 2 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 129. 3 See Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 6 and passim. 4 Eric Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads of Eighteenth Century Britain (London: Academic Press, 1977), 154. S TEPHAN K OHL 134 “greatest decadal mileage increase in the 1750s and 1760s.” 5 The new and mostly well-maintained network of roads was also used by travellers who toured the country just out of curiosity. If these ‘tourists’ discussed, in their travelogues, the transport infrastructure they found, it was inevitable that they would challenge the dominant notion of a vertically structured society as they represented national space as a web of horizontal relations and connections. Mobility and the traditional concept of the nation are incompatible. “Once the spatial knowledge of the common traveller is embraced […] then the nature of nationhood is significantly transformed.” 6 This type of travel writing developed against the background of the dominant view of the nation as a place of social order, with the monarch as God’s representative, the estates, and all its hierarchies. In the 18 th century, then, a clash can be observed of the traditional - vertical - concept of the nation and the spatial practices of ‘tourists’ which resulted in a horizontal concept. The struggle between these two differing types of representing the nation gives 18 th -century representations of mobility an important place in the development of the concept of the nation. The discussion of these travelogues will examine the information they provide on (1) the road system as a horizontal organisation of national space, (2) churches and great houses as signifiers of authority for tracing any vertical ideas of Britain, (3) the scenic quality of landscapes, and (4) the travellers’ view of the nation. 2 Texts from the Beginning of the 18 th Century 2.1 Type I: Vertical Space: John Macky John Macky’s Journey Through England (1714) hardly ever gives any details of how the traveller toured the country. At best readers are given the number of hours it took the traveller to make his progress from one place to the next: “in four Hours I got to Rumney […]; and in three Hours more, through these Meadows, I arriv’d at Rye.” 7 5 See Pawson 115. These travel times are useless if one is attempting to reconstruct a horizontally organised nation. Defoe will later criticise Macky’s traveller for his neglect to record his spatial practice: 6 Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 68. 7 John Macky, A Journey Through England: In Familiar Letters From a Gentleman Here, to his Friend Abroad (2 nd ed. London: Hooke, 1722 [1714]), 91. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 135 From York we did not jump at once over the whole Country, and, like a late Author, without taking notice of any Thing, come out again sixty or seventy Miles off, like an Apparition, without being seen by the way. 8 When, rarely enough, actual road conditions are considered to be worthy of notice it is not out of interest in the nation’s transport infrastructure, but with the convenience of the nobility in mind: The Country round it [i.e. Petworth] being fat and fertile, makes the Roads bad in Winter; whereas the Downs […] are firm and solid all the Year round; and to which his Grace must have the Mortification to ride in the Dirt when he goes a hunting (Macky 107). The idea that a bad road is an obstruction to the circulation of people and goods does not cross this traveller’s mind. Instead, he identifies with a member of the nobility by wishing him easier access to his pleasure. Royalty and the nobility form indeed the centre of the traveller’s interest and their houses function as signifiers of authority. Introducing his enthusiastic 30-page-long description of Windsor Castle he states its significance quite clearly: Windsor is the celebrated Habitation of the Kings of England since the Reign of Edward III, though indeed it has belonged to the Crown since the Norman Conquest […]. The Situation of this charming Castle seems design’d by Nature for Royal Majesty, being on the Top of a rising Ground, which with an august State overlooks all the adjacent Country (27-28). Readers are even given help in the correct understanding of this passage: “Windsor will give you a just Idea of the Grandeur of the English Nation” (58). The traveller’s selection of sights is determined by his veneration of gentry and nobility, certainly not by any taste for scenery, and this motivation explains why he gives much space to the Colleges of Cambridge: they were all established by royalty and members of the nobility and thus reflect their noble founders’ authority, as, for instance, Clare Hall which “owes its Beauty to the Lady Elizabeth Burk, Countess of Clare” (155). This traveller’s discursive construction of the nation is indeed solidly vertical. In accordance with his vertical view of the nation, the history of places and their rulers is more important than any activities of the present. Macky’s traveller even refuses to register the occupations of not a few persons of rank: abroad it is generally believed, that the ancient Nobility of this Nation is lost in Trade […]; yet by the exact Examination I have made from the Records of this Order, it is plain, that very few Nations can shew a more uninterrupted Course of ancient Nobility (43-44). 8 Daniel Defoe, Writings on Travel, Discovery and History, vols. I-III: A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001 [1724-26]), 3: 102. S TEPHAN K OHL 136 Macky, a Scotsman, uses his Journey to have England praised for cutting “the most conspicuous and shining Figure of any in the World” (i-ii) and a “glorious Country of Liberty” (viii). At the same time he claims: “Scotland is a Province by it self” (227). Obviously, the Union has not been accepted by the author. This attitude explains his publishing strategy: two volumes of the Journey Through England were followed, in 1723, by a one-volume Journey Through Scotland. This third Journey was marketed as a book “Which Compleats Great Britain,” 9 Macky’s travel books propagate the traditional view of the English nation: neither does the traveller of the various Journeys develop a horizontal notion of the country, nor has the Union affected his conviction that England and Scotland are different nations. Macky’s Journeys are examples of a systematic negation of all consequences mobility might have for the concept of nationhood. but no attempt was made to produce a coherent domestic travelogue. The phrase “the whole Island of Great Britain” (i) appears in brackets only, a typographical practice in starkest contrast to Defoe’s decision to raise the Whole Island of Great Britain to the level of book title. Macky’s brackets certainly are a political statement: the idea of the Union should not be encouraged. In an unmistakeably regretful tone, readers are informed that Scotland, once proud of her “ancient independent State” (ii), “has subsisted by a successive Series of Kings for above Two Thousand Years, till by the Union it was incorporated and indented with England into One Dominion of Great Britain” (i-ii). 2.2 Type II: Horizontal Space: Celia Fiennes, Daniel Defoe Celia Fiennes’ notes of journeys undertaken from the 1680s onwards - written down mainly in 1702 10 which is all the Kings and Queens appartments, and lookes very noble, the walls round with the battlements and gilt balls and other adornments; here I ferry over the Thames and so went a nearer way which is a private road made for the kings coaches. - best reveal her view of the nation in a passage on Windsor Castle, 11 The flippant comment: it “is all […] appartments” ignores the value of Windsor Castle as a monument signifying authority. Indeed, the traveller’s phrasing shows disrespect for authorities as is revealed by the pragmatic justifica- 9 John Macky, A Journey Through Scotland: In Familiar Letters From a Gentleman Here, to his Friend Abroad (London: Pemberton, 1723), title page. 10 Christopher Morris, “Introduction,” The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685-c.1712, ed. Christopher Morris (Stroud: Sutton, 1995 [1984]), 17. 11 Celia Fiennes, The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 1685-c.1712, ed. Christopher Morris (Stroud: Sutton, 1995 [1984]), 221. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 137 tion of what is presented as trespassing on the king’s “private road” - “so went a nearer way.” In Fiennes’ travel notes, traditional vertical English space no longer exists, and, accordingly, the past and its authorities seem immaterial: Ipswitch has 12 Churches, their streetes of a good size well pitch’d with small stones, a good Market Cross railed in, I was there on Satturday which is their market day and saw they sold their butter by the pinte, 20 ounces for 6 pence, and often for 5d. or 4d (132). The church-building activities of the past, which were also about the construction of signifiers of power, pale into insignificance when compared with present activities: good roads and thriving agricultural businesses. If, occasionally, noble buildings are presented as seats of power, the traveller usually resorts to a few disparaging remarks on the house or its owner: Tutbury Castle “is the kings, a great fortification but all decay’d” (149). Commenting on a visit to Durham, the traveller’s first remarks are concerned with the interior of the Bishop’s Palace: “the furniture was not very fine, the best being taken down in the absence of my Lord Crew” (179). It is only after this observation that the traveller itemises the wealth and authority of the third Baron Crew, with the effect that this figure of power has been deflated before we are given an impression of his importance. Lord Crew who is not only a Barron of England but is a great Prince as being Bishop of the whole Principallity off Durham and has a great royalty and authority, is as an absolute Prince and has a great command as well as revenue; his spirituall is 5 or 6000£ and his temporalls since his brothers death makes it much more (179). Yet, as this powerful man was obviously not able to prevent the theft of his more valuable pieces of furniture he emerges as a slightly ridiculous figure. The traveller’s poor view of the effective authority of bishops is corroborated when entering York: “For one of the Metropolis and the See of the Archbishop it makes but a meane appearance” (90). Observation of the present state of things always invalidates traditional claims of authority. Though no longer seats of authority, manor houses, castles and churches are still of interest to Fiennes’ traveller; but if they seem attractive, they appeal for aesthetic reasons. However, this traveller is never emotionally engaged in the enjoyment of aesthetically pleasing views; all she conveys in her “impressionist style” 12 12 Pat Rogers, The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design of Defoe’s Tour (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998), 38. are surfaces: Salisbury Cathedral, for instance, “is esteemed the finest in England” (36) not least because “the top of the Quoire is exactly painted and it lookes as fresh as if but new done though 300 yeares standing” (37). S TEPHAN K OHL 138 The traveller’s engagement with space produces an England which is characterised by roads of various qualities, but generally good enough to enable moderately fast journeys: “From Newtontony to Warminster, a good road town, and good way; thence to Breackly [Berkley] a deep clay way […]” (44). Even before turnpike building got under way Fiennes’ traveller constructs an English space which organises the interrelationships of places ‘horizontally’, “positing a nation endlessly amenable to the tourist’s curious investigation.” 13 As the list of these purely material values shows, Fiennes’ traveller produces a travelogue which shows that the shift from a vertical view of the nation to one focussed on a network of relations jeopardises a sense of the nation. Were it not for the existence of ‘abroad’ (32), mobility as a spatial practice would not, in her case, engender an idea of an English nation. In fact, the traveller’s very spatial practice makes it impossible to delineate a distinctive English space: always in a hurry, she is restricted to a most superficial perception of the country: “St. Johns Colledge had fine gardens and walkes but I did but just look into it, so I did into Kings, and Queens Colledges and severall of the rest I looked into; they are much alike in building” (57). Traditional meanings are replaced by the new categories of ease of access, the activity of local markets, “good buildings, different produces and manufactures” (329), cleanliness etc. Indefatigably moving around, Fiennes’ traveller is even unable to do justice to regional characteristics: “Devonshire […] is much like Somersetshire - fruitfull Country’s for corn graseing, much for inclosures that makes the wayes very narrow” (41), and her vision of England is blurred at best: “the whole country [i.e. County Durham] looks like a fruitfull woody place and seemes to equal most countys in England” (178). No wonder, then, that this traveller’s style “continually repairs to a handful of all-purpose modifiers.” 14 This creation of a mobility-based sense of the nation was achieved by Daniel Defoe. The traveller of his Tour through the Whole Island of Britain (1724-26) even delivers a panegyric on the newly built turnpike roads: “they are very great Things, and very great Things are done by them.” Superficial generalisations, however, cannot form a base for a definition of the qualities of the English nation. Mobility proves to be an obstacle to the creation of a sense of the nation. 15 A traveller thus ‘enthused’ 16 13 McRae 201. by the emerging turnpike-road system will no doubt represent the nation as a horizontally organised space. Consequently Defoe’s text 14 Joanna Picciotto, “Breaking through the Mode: Celia Fiennes and the Exercise of Curiosity,” Literature Compass 6.2 (2009): 306. 15 Defoe 2: 236. 16 See Betty A. Schellenberg, “Imagining the Nation in Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain,” ELH 62 (1995): 303. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 139 no longer deals with the monuments of the past at any length. However, his declaration: “looking back into remote Things is studiously avoided” (1: 47) is justified by reminding the reader of the work of Camden and others who have provided historical information on Britain’s antiquities. Their achievements make it possible for the Tour to focus on the present state of Britain without necessarily distancing itself from the British past. Indeed, more than once, readers are asked to take on the responsibility for acquiring knowledge of the nation’s past while the traveller does his duty to inform them of its present condition: The Cathedral of this City [i.e. Norwich] is a fine Fabrick […]; the Church has so many Antiquities in it, that our late great Scholar and Physician, Sir Tho. Brown, thought it worth his while to write a whole Book to collect the Monuments and Inscriptions in this Church, to which I refer the Reader. The River Yare runs through this City, and is Navigable thus far without the help of any Art, (that is to say, without Locks or Stops) (1: 107). Yet, the self-reflective traveller can change his approach - as in the case of his detailed depiction of Windsor Castle: “I must leave talking of Trade, River, Navigation, Meal, and Malt, and describe the most beautiful […] Castle, and Royal Palace, in the whole Isle of Britain.” (2: 51). The very building which provoked Fiennes’ traveller into a most flippant attitude is singled out for carrying the symbolic power of the monarch’s authority. A sense of the nation is created by referring to the old hierarchies - either directly as in this passage on Windsor Castle or, in a more mediated way, by praising the value of antiquarian research. Yet the signifying quality of seats of power is mentioned but rarely in this travelogue. A vertical sense of the nation is excluded even by the very title of his topographical survey which asserts that the book is A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, not, as one would expect, “A Tour through the Whole ‘Kingdom’ or ‘Realm’ of Britain.” 17 Defoe’s traveller approaches the task of creating a sense of the nation by using his observations on the present state of Britain as a basis for envisioning the nation’s splendid future. The literary strategies for creating a concept of the future nation range from apologetic remarks on the restricted reliability of the Tour as a guide to Britain to the development of visions of wealth. Apologies for giving out-of-date information to any readers taking up the Tour a couple of years after its publication are justified by the nation’s development into a better state: “no Description of Great Britain can be, what we call a finished Account, as no Cloaths can be made to fit a growing Child” (1: 49). The very obsolescence of the Tour establishes the nation’s attractive prospects. 17 See Terence N. Bowers, “Great Britain Imagined: Nation, Citizen, and Class in Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain,” Prose Studies 16.3 (1993): 151. S TEPHAN K OHL 140 Interestingly enough, the Tour’s vision of the nation neglects the category of ‘born in Britain.’ As the example of some poor German families repeopling the New Forest shows, everyone can contribute to the “Wealth and Strength of a Kingdom, provided those Inhabitants were such, as by honest Industry applied themselves to live by their Labour” (1: 233). For Defoe’s traveller, being engaged in the improvement of British soil defines the sense of the nation; descent and nationality are immaterial. What counts is the fact that the original investment in those immigrants, “the ready Money of 4000l. which the Government was to advance to those twenty Farmers” (1: 236), came from Britain’s government. This non-genealogical argument of the Tour is also employed when the traveller faces the task of incorporating Scotland, the newly acquired “Province, or at best a Dominion” (3: 11), into the concept of a British nation. Again he adopts the strategy of “describing it, as it really is, and as in Time it may be” (3: 148). Improvement will be the characteristic feature of this part of Great Britain as well, and even if it will lag behind England in the foreseeable future it shares the dynamic nature of the nation: “they are where we were, I mean as to the Improvement of their Country and Commerce; and they may be where we are.” (3: 148). Defoe’s traveller is “committed to the idea that the Union was both right and necessary.” 18 2.3 Vertical vs. Horizontal Space in Early 18 th -Century Britain In Defoe’s Tour mobility as a spatial practice and a belief in a British nation coexist on the basis of imagining the success of a shared effort to achieve a perfect life in the promised land on earth. The question of how to imagine the nation was still debated at the very beginning of the transport revolution. Information on the conditions of mobility Buildings signifying authority Emotional involvement with scenic landscape View of nationhood Type I (Macky): vertical space - + the past Type II (Fiennes, Defoe): horizontal space + - the present (and the future) 18 Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707-1832 (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007), 11. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 141 Macky’s perception of national space continues the vertical paradigm whereas Defoe’s traveller has to undertake continued conceptual work to develop a view of the nation based on his horizontal perception of the country: he imagines a future Great Britain by singling out from his travel experiences those elements from which he can build his vision. Fiennes’ traveller takes mobility for granted but, not being prepared to do conceptual work, does not raise the issue of national space at all. While Macky and Defoe are involved in the ideological work of propagating a valid view of the nation, Fiennes’ traveller is just chattering away. 3 Texts from the 1770s 3.1 Type A: Dual Positioning: Thomas Gray Approaching the second group of texts, separated from the first group by a half-century and 13,000 miles of turnpike-building, one finds an example of an unresolved tension between vertically and horizontally imagined space: Thomas Gray’s Journal of his Visit to the Lake District in October 1769 (1775). On the one hand, the Journal can easily be used for a reconstruction of the region’s road network - “a turnpike is brought from Cockermouth to Ewsbridge 5 miles & is carrying on to Penrith” 19 -, on the other hand, and reflecting the traditional view of the nation, it records the progress of the walker by “ticking off the names of landowners whose estates he was passing.” 20 went to see Ulz-water 5 miles distant. soon left the Keswick-road & turn’d to the left thro’ shady lanes along the Vale of Eeman, w ch runs rapidly on near the way, ripling over the stones. to the right is Delmaine, a large fabric of pale red stone with 9 windows in front & 7 on the side built by M r Hassel, behind it a fine lawn surrounded by woods & a long rocky eminence rising over them. a clear & brisk rivulet runs by the house […]. However, individual sensibility bridges all discrepancies arising from this lack of a clear definition of the nation’s space from the very beginning of the Journal: Farther on appears Hatton S t John, a castle like old mansion of M r Huddleston (33). The information contained in this passage belongs to three different categories. First, there are items derived from a horizontal view of the nation: Gray’s traveller is specific about distances (“5 miles”) and directions (“Keswick-road,” turning left into “lanes along the Vale of Eeman”). Secondly, based on the vertical idea of the nation, Dalemain and Hutton John are mentioned as manifestations of the ownership and governance of the land the 19 Thomas Gray, Journal of his Visit to the Lake District in October 1769, ed. William Roberts (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2001 [1775]), 71. 20 William Roberts, “Commentary,” Thomas Gray’s Journal of his Visit to the Lake District in October 1769, ed. William Roberts (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2001), 29. S TEPHAN K OHL 142 traveller traverses. In addition, Dalemain House is characterized, though not emphatically, as a symbol of authority (“a large fabric,” “fine lawn surrounded by woods”). Thirdly, the traveller reveals that he is aesthetically pleased with the landscape (“shady lanes,” “ripling over the stones,” “fine lawn,” “a clear & brisk rivulet”). Gray’s traveller develops an alternative idea of the country by introducing an aesthetic dimension into the literary genre of domestic tours: “this is the sweetest scene I can yet discover in point of pastoral beauty, the rest are in a sublimer style” (59). This traveller’s spatial practice is “exploratory of the emotional, psychological and even spiritual stimuli” 21 Yet this “entranced relationship to the scene” of landscapes. He is far from claiming that an idea of the nation can be derived from the aesthetic pleasure British spaces can provide, but the seeds for this argument are sown. He does not sum up his delighted literary recreations of pastoral English scenes with patriotic generalisations although he states that this part of England, containing not merely one “little unsuspected paradise” (88), enjoys the special grace of God: “saw from an eminence at two miles distance the Vale of Elysium in all its verdure, the sun then playing on the bosom of the lake, & lighting up all the mountains with its lustre” (39). 22 3.2 Type B: Horizontal Space: Thomas Pennant, Arthur Young and Samuel Johnson remains at the level of personal sensitivity. Overwhelmed by a “changing prospect at every ten paces” (45) the traveller, understandably, is not willing to reflect on the consequences his enjoyment of the scene might have on his view of the nation. The traveller in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides (1772) takes the existence of a network of well laid-out highways and byeroads for granted; bad roads seem to be a thing of the past: “Cross the river on a bridge of five arches, ascend a hill, through lanes once deep, narrow, and of difficult approach.” 23 from a neighboring warehouse much cheese is shipped off, brought down the river in boats from the rich grazing grounds, that extend as far as Nantwich. The river, by means of locks, is navigable for barges as high as Winslow bridge; but below this admits vessels of sixty tuns (7). Of all components of infrastructure, Britain’s canals are given his foremost attention: throughout the Tour, he observes - often in much detail - how new canals, regulated rivers and improved harbours facilitate the circulation of goods: 21 William Ruddick, “Thomas Gray’s Travel Writing,” Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, ed. W.B. Hutchings and William Ruddick (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1993), 127-28. 22 Roberts 49. 23 Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides (Chester: Monk, 1772), 20 (emphasis added). Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 143 This traveller certainly entertains a view of the nation as a horizontally organised space. In accordance with this perception of the nation, Pennant’s traveller does not attach any signifying quality to churches or the houses of the great. Buildings are summed up in one sentence which leads to some historical anecdote connected with the building in question: pass by Norton, a good modern house, on the site of a priory of canons regular of St. Augustine, founded by William, son of Nigellius, A.D. 1135, who did not live to complete his design; for Eustace de Burgaville granted to Hugh de Catherik pasture for a hundred sheep, in case he finished the church in all respects conformable to the intent of the founder (8). The Tour’s focus is on the present with its economic and infrastructural characteristics, and the past is dissolved in a series of anecdotes which never add up to a body of traditions from which an idea of the nation could be derived. Even the extended description of the Anglo-Saxon Ruthwell Cross is not summarized in a way which could establish some dignified past; any reader expecting some reflections on the respective roles of the Romans, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons in the forging of the nation will be diverted by an amusing anecdote: “Scotland has had its vicar of Bray: for in this church-yard is an inscription in memory of Mr. Gawin Young […]” (98). There are many ‘fine views’ in Pennant’s Tour, yet not one of them affects the traveller. Readers get but an inventory of landscape features. When he points out ‘beauty’ the term is used as a rhetorical device to enhance his approval of fertile land, wealthy towns and successful business: “Continue my journey due North through the beautiful Nithsdale, or vale of Nith, the river meandering […] along rich meadows; and the country, for some space, adorned with groves and gentlemen’s seats” (121). The idea of the nation which emerges from Pennant’s Tour is a poorer version of Defoe’s notion of the beneficial effects of a flourishing production and circulation of goods. Poorer, as Pennant’s traveller not only dissolves the past’s identity-forming power in a series of entertaining anecdotes but also abstains from any visionary sketch of a Great Britain thoroughly ‘improved’. He lives one-dimensionally in the present. Part of the traveller’s present is the Union, and he, true to his horizontal concept of Great Britain, is glad to be able to cross the once disputed border several times without any difficulties: “before the accession of James I. to these kingdoms, the borders of both were in perpetual feuds: after that happy event, those that lived by hostile excursions, […] were at length extirpated” (78). The task of incorporating Scotland into the nation is also solved by the structure of the Tour: although called A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides, a considerable part of the book - more than 100 pages - centres on places in the North of England. By his slow approach to Scotland and the S TEPHAN K OHL 144 easy crossing of the border, the traveller seems to suggest that the distinction between the two kingdoms has become immaterial. The traveller of Arthur Young’s Six Months’ Tour Through the North of England (1770) constantly comments on England’s road infrastructure: “From Newport Pagnell I took the road to Bedford, if I may venture to call such a cursed string of hills and holes by the name of road” 24 Any vertical positioning is avoided. At the beginning of his Tour, this traveller even thinks he “should apologize for introducing so many descriptions of houses, paintings, ornamented parks, lakes etc.” (vi). But what he calls ‘descriptions’ are in fact inventories which lack any potential for turning the nation’s great houses into signifiers of power. Houses are assessed for their value, and the Tour’s language on these occasions is straight from the estate agent’s book: Leaving Bedford for Northill, he is pleasantly surprised “to find after I left the turnpike, that the road continued a very fine causeway […]; I could scarce believe myself upon a bye-road which induced me to enquire […]” (26). This emotional involvement with, and curiosity about, road conditions is typical of a horizontal perception of the country. The Billiard Room, newly fitted up, 33 by 21, the chimney-piece of white marble polished, and a rounding of Siena; it is light and pretty. The Chapel, not finished; 33 by 24 […]. The Bow-window-room, 45 by 33, painted by Le Guere […] (38). This materialistic view of the great houses is not at all impaired by the traveller’s occasional aesthetic comments. His praise of “the beauties of hill and dale, wood and water” (8) is reserved for the parks of great houses, and his aesthetic appreciation is not founded on any emotional involvement with the qualities of the scenes. Rather, the wording of these landscape pieces reveals that well-designed parks are evaluated as assets of the house: the language uses a random selection of the terms used in contemporary landscape aesthetics, yet these “aesthetic observations take place within what he calls ‘the swelling canvas of active commerce.’” 25 The view of the nation emerging from this materialistic approach is based on the financial value of houses and land and their “capability” (9) of being The park at Luton Hoo, for instance, is indiscriminately praised for offering views which are “beautiful” and “picturesque,” “prettily diversified” and “noble,” “charming” and “magnificent,” “fine,” “elegant,” “pleasing” and generally having “a good effect” (8-9). This is, again, the language of estate agents who list vendible commodities, not of someone who has developed a personal relationship to the scene. 24 Arthur Young, A Six Months’ Tour Through the North of England, vol. 1 (of 3) (Dublin: P. Wilson et al., 1770), 23. 25 Benjamin Colbert, “Aesthetics of Enclosure: Agricultural Tourism and the Place of the Picturesque,” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 24. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 145 improved. Like Defoe in his Tour, the agricultural reformer Young urges the nation’s landowners to improve their estates and farms in order to create a rich and powerful nation. But the comparison with Defoe’s Tour also shows that Young’s exclusively materialistic view of the nation is lamentably poor as its past does not contribute to his idea of nationhood. As the commodification of houses, works of art and scenes depends on mobility, and as commodification requires access to these objects, the traveller of Young’s Tour is firmly restricted to a horizontal idea of the nation. In Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the traveller regularly comments on road conditions in Scotland and, further north, he admires road-building techniques in more difficult territory: The road on which we travelled, and which was itself a source of entertainment, is made along the rock, in the direction of the lough, sometimes by breaking off protuberances, and sometimes by cutting the great mass of stone to a considerable depth. 26 This marked interest in roads characterizes Johnson’s traveller as a representative of those who have adopted a horizontal view of the nation. Correspondingly, part of the archaic attraction of the Highlands is the lack of proper transportational infrastructure, and he is thrilled by the prospect of entering “a country upon which perhaps no wheel has ever rolled” (29). In accordance with this attitude, he cannot find any signifying quality in churches and great houses in the majority of cases because all seats of power are now in ruins, at best “fragments of magnificence” (11) which can no longer convey the meaning of authority: St. Andrews “cathedral, of which the foundations may still be traced, and a small part of the wall is standing, appears to have been a spacious and majestick building, not unsuitable to the primacy of the kingdom” (5). Yet the traveller also regrets the loss of buildings able to signify authority. Although he subscribes to the contemporary horizontal view of the nation he is aware of its sadder implications, one of them being its neglect of the traditional signs of authority: “It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence” (24). Yet his own remarks on undamaged buildings are too short and too general to carry any meaning, and they are immediately followed by practical considerations: we saw the laird’s house, a neat modern fabrick, and found Mr. Macleod, the proprietor of the island […] expecting us on the beach. […] Our reception exceeded our expectations. We found nothing but civility, elegance, and plenty (58-59). 26 Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven: Yale UP, 1971), 31. S TEPHAN K OHL 146 Here, the traveller’s criterion for the usefulness of great houses - providing personal comfort - reveals a decidedly materialistic mind which is not even impressed by the scenic qualities of the Highlands. Initially, Johnson’s journey to Scotland was meant to be an exploration of “a newly discovered coast” (13) of archaic customs and an un-English style of life. Yet the traveller who likes to call himself an “Englishman” (25) is compelled to register a growing coherence of Britain. On closer inspection of things Scottish, he detects a convergence of Scottish and English attitudes which is due to the adoption of an English-style economy in Scotland: the Highlanders “are now acquainted with money, and the possibility of gain will by degrees make them industrious” (58). Consequently, the Highlanders will soon be absorbed into a larger commercial Britain with her trade and the necessary circulation of goods. Notwithstanding the economic ‘improvement’ connected with this development, the traveller reveals himself as a sceptic: will the Highlanders not lose in terms of happiness what they gain in wealth? His regret at seeing the old patriarchal relationships being replaced by economic interdependencies is tempered, though, by “satisfaction with contemporary English civilisation,” 27 which in turn is based on the exchange of ideas and the circulation of books and journals - on mobility - even if this civilization will bring about the extinction of the culture of the Highlanders who “are now losing their distinction, and hastening to mingle with the general community” (47). In Johnson’s Journey, a “significant tension” 28 between a nostalgic admiration for the archaic spirit of the Scottish people and a belief in Scotland’s progress towards civilisation prevents the development of a clearly visible idea of the British nation. The traveller’s frame of mind is securely anchored in a horizontal view of the nation, although his Journey “recognizes the questionable morality of extending one general system of values so that it overpowers another” 29 27 Thomas M. Curley, “Johnson’s Tour of Scotland and the Idea of Great Britain,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 12.1 (1989): 137. : “I saw with grief the chief of a very ancient clan, whose island was condemned by law to be sold for the satisfaction of his creditors” (85). A high price, the abolition of Scottish culture, will have to be paid for the inevitable British nationhood. 28 Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 163. 29 Alison Hickey, “ ‘ Extensive Views’ in Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,” SEL 32 (1992): 545. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 147 3.3 Type C: The Challenge: Horizontal and Aestheticized Space: Mary Ann Hanway and William Gilpin The traveller of Mary Ann Hanway’s Journey (1776) is used to the British network of reliable roads: “Nothing need be said of the road between England and this place [i.e. Edinburgh], it being so universally known […].” 30 No evidence of a vertical view of the country can be found in the Journey. The noblest of houses are dismissed with a few words, too laconic to produce descriptions which could establish the houses’ signifying power. When, on one occasion, a castle could signify the authority of its owner, the traveller hastens to put the stamp of unreliability on this piece of information: “the seat of a prince of Orkney, who an old woman, - the Cicerone of the place - assured us, was the second man in the kingdom […]; this was all the information she could give us, and, therefore, all I can give you.” (69-70). For this traveller, mobility has completely erased any vestiges of the vertical view of the nation. Travel conditions are unvaryingly presented as good; and if a hierarchy of roads is established it is according to aesthetic rather than practical principles: an “agreeable” (107) road must at least offer scenic views, if not “a pleasing gloominess” (52). Scenic views are much appreciated by Hanway’s traveller, but she seems to look for a justification of this way of satisfying her curiosity. High principles seem at stake here, as she opposes the traditional view that God had initially created the world as a perfectly even globe and that mountains and other irregularities had come into existence as a consequence of the Fall: if the face of the earth was naturally uniform; if destitute of that diversity, which it derives from the hill and valley, the barren heath, and the blooming garden, there would [not] be any motive to excite the curiosity of the traveller […]. (63-64). With Hanway’s traveller, the perception of the country as space which can easily be traversed facilitates an emotional engagement with a country’s topographical features: she is constantly involved in an intensely felt personal appreciation of the moods which can be obtained from exposing oneself emotionally to certain landscape features as “those occasional glooms which seemed to breathe the spirit of melancholy, from the surrounding barrenness” (ix). A series of waterfalls provokes the confession: “There is something exquisite to me, even in the cadence of a cascade: as I listened to it in this captivating spot, I really felt my imagination expand” (54). In this frame of mind, a tour of Scotland can be split up into a succession of “romantic walks” (32), roads of “pleasing gloominess” (52), “ruins [which] fill me with melancholy 30 Mary Ann Hanway, A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland: With Occasional Remarks on Dr. Johnson’s Tour (London: Fielding and Walker, 1776 [? ]), 1. S TEPHAN K OHL 148 reflections” (97), “beautiful views” (62), places one is “extravagantly fond” (34) of and, now and then, a “sublime prospect of the sea” (143). Hanway’s Journey projects an idea of an aesthetically satisfying nation which definitely includes Scotland. The traveller talks down any dissimilarity between England and Scotland and emphasises the uniformity of the two countries. Findhorn, for instance, “is not inferior to the most cultivated village in England” (118), and, as for the Scots, they all excel, if from a higher social class, in “hospitality and politeness” (78). Two generations after the Union, the traveller meets everywhere with a remarkable “civility of the people” (72). Due to improved conditions of mobility, Hanway’s traveller projects a horizontal idea of British nationhood based mainly on landscapes which address the emotions of the traveller. In this respect, “Hanway’s traveller reflects a change in England’s perception of Scotland” 31 William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782) are made by a traveller who takes networks of roads and navigable waterways for granted: “From Monmouth to Abergavanny, by Ragland-castle, the road is a good stone causeway; (as the roads, in these parts, commonly are).” : Scottish scenery adds new value to the qualities of Great Britain. 32 As expected in a traveller rooted in a horizontal notion of the country, great houses and churches do not signify authority. In fact, the traveller relies on a literary strategy of mocking the appeal old and venerable buildings might possess: “The transmutations of time are often ludicrous. Monmouth- Roads and rivers are assessed in terms of the scenic pleasure they provide: thus, all roads are “disagreeable” which fail to afford visual entertainment: “Nothing appears, but downs on each side” (5). Gilpin’s traveller measures the profit provided by the nation’s communication arteries in aesthetic terms exclusively. Even industrial activities are praised only if they contribute to a good view: “Many of the furnaces, on the banks of the river, consume charcoal […] which is frequently seen issuing from the sides of the hills; and spreading its thin veil over a part of them, beautifully breaks their lines ” (12). Similarly, commercial traffic does not indicate flourishing trade activities generating wealth, but the traveller registers traffic as an element contributing to picturesque effects: “we were often entertained with light vessels gliding past us. Their white sails passing along the sides of the hills were very picturesque” (30). 31 Doris Feldmann, “Economic and/ as Aesthetic Constructions of Britishness in Eighteenth-Century Domestic Travel Writing,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 4.1-2 (1997): 39. 32 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London: Blamire, 1782), 47. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 149 castle was formerly the palace of a king; and birth-place of a mighty prince: it is now converted into a yard for fatting ducks” (27). Buildings generally are at best ruinous “ornaments” (14) of the landscape, at worst they spoil what could be a good view. This traveller’s mobility allows no vertical concepts of the nation’s space. Gilpin’s Observations do not transform ekphrastically visual impressions into descriptive prose passages: rather, this travelogue examines the landscapes of Britain - Observations on the Highlands were published in 1789 - “by the rules of picturesque beauty” (1-2). Picturesque qualities, however, are often the result of mental improvements on what can actually be seen. Speaking of the picturesque, the traveller admits: “The imagination formed it, after the vision vanished.” (52). As often as not Gilpin’s traveller writes about the results of his imaginary improvements on the scenes he often saw indistinctly enough, just as he writes about his observations. Beyond the registering of impressions, the Observations search for aesthetic improvements which could perfect British scenes according to the aesthetic standards of the picturesque. 3.4 Horizontal British Space in the 1770s - Aestheticized Of all the travellers of the domestic travelogues of the 1770s, only Thomas Pennant’s narrator manages to replace the traditional vertical view of the nation’s space by a horizontal view without difficulties. All other travellers emphasise one aspect of the loss of a familiar descriptive pattern. The traveller in Arthur Young’s Tour resorts to a provocatively materialistic approach by presenting land, buildings and works of art as commodities: Young’s traveller constructs a one-dimensional Britain which excludes both the nation’s past and its potential. This ‘secularising’ effect of a horizontal view of the nation explains the nostalgic attitude in Johnson’s Journey with its traveller who cannot but regret the loss of all non-material values under the impact of a society based on financial values. One can sympathise indeed with the narrator of Thomas Gray’s Journal when he is more than reluctant to part with the idea of a vertically organised British space: sensing the demise of the traditional concept, he experiments with the introduction of a new set of values into the task of defining the nation and develops a taste of the aesthetic qualities of the country. The definition of nationhood remains a subject for debate in the 1770s. Young’s emphatic materialism tries to fill the same gap as Gray’s aesthetic way of perceiving the country. Yet Gray’s innovation does not make the definition of nationhood any easier as it opens up a new dichotomy by “establishing the […] division between aesthetic perception and productive utili- S TEPHAN K OHL 150 ty.” 33 In the 1770s, the choice is between a purely economic and an aesthetic view of Britain. Information on the conditions of mobility Buildings signifying authority Emotional involvement with scenic landscape View of nationhood Type A (Gray): dual positioning + + + aestheticized space Type B (Pennant, Young, Johnson): horizontal space + - materialistic; the present (and the future) Type C (Hanway; Gilpin): the challenge: horizontal and aestheticized space - - + the present (and the future) Mary Ann Hanway, who cultivates a taste for scenic tours, is at pains to justify her non-commercial notion of Britain. In an ill-thought-out attempt to play down the dichotomy between economic and aesthetic definitions of the nation, her traveller even attacks a popular religious idea, the doctrine of a “naturally uniform” 34 33 Stephen Copley, “William Gilpin and the Black-lead Mine,” The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 53. earth, and claims that “diversity, which it [i.e. the earth] derives from the hill and valley” (63) is also an “incentive for one country to connect itself commercially with another” (64). Only William Gilpin defines the nation unapologetically in purely aesthetic terms. Yet, in order to avoid the impression of being a socially useless enthusiast for picturesque scenes, he has his traveller resort to the literary strategy employed in Defoe’s Tour: he sketches a view of a future Britain as imagined on the evidence of present-day impressions. 34 Hanway 38. Spatial Practices of 18 th -Century Domestic Travellers 151 4 Summary By the 1770s, Britain’s improved transport infrastructure had indeed, as Curry stated, changed “the ways people have conceptualized space.” 35 Just as Defoe developed, from his inspection of Britain, a vision of a commercially flourishing, Eden-like nation, so Gilpin proposes a constant process of aesthetic improvement at the end of which a perfectly ‘picturesque’ Britain might be found. For Gilpin as for Defoe, the view of the nation is derived from its potential rather than its reality. Both commercial and aesthetic improvement depend on human activity. Yet the traditional vertical view of the nation’s space was a concept marked by “transcendence”: The transport revolution of the 18 th century with its increased mobility is one of the engines of the shift from the traditional definitions of Britain to a fairly modern concept of the nation. 36 35 Curry 502. the nation as a place of social order, with the monarch as God’s representative. With Defoe and Gilpin focussing on improvement, one could argue that the transport revolution is also an engine for creating further confidence in the beneficial effects of human activity. 36 Tuan 129. S TEPHAN K OHL 152 Works Cited Bowers, Terence N. “Great Britain Imagined: Nation, Citizen, and Class in Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.” Prose Studies 16.3 (1993): 148-178. Colbert, Benjamin. “Aesthetics of Enclosure: Agricultural Tourism and the Place of the Picturesque.” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 23-34. 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B IRGIT N EUMANN ‘Travels for the Heart’: Practices of Mobility, Concepts of Movement and Constructions of Individuality in Sentimental Travelogues 1. Travel and Sentimentality in 18 th -Century British Culture In 1768, the Monthly Review announced that “Sentimental Travels seem now to be coming into vogue; and, indeed, we shall rejoice to see a final period put to those dull details of post-stages, and churches, and picture-catalogues, with which books of travels heretofore chiefly abounded.” 1 The exploration of affecting human experiences, the powers and limits of sympathy, rather than the enumeration of “dull” tourist sites lies at the heart of the sentimental travelogue. In the sentimental travelogue, practices of mobility gave rise not only to observations of foreign customs and to comparative debates of domestic affairs at home - the typical concern of previous travelogues. 2 Rather, mobility also became a catalyst for the indulgence in sentiment, for the examination of the ever-changing inner states of the subject and, more importantly, for self-reflexive engagements with mobility. Centring around the notion of ‘transport,’ sentimental travelogues are frequently predicated on the close connection between motion and emotion. 3 Moreover, while many previous 18 th -century travellers knew from systematic preparatory reading what they would find on the beaten tracks of Europe, the sentimental traveller was interested in first-hand experiences of the foreign, in transgression, the unknown and various forms of digression. Sentimental travel was therefore intricately bound up with the assertion of individuality, the flaunting of originality and, more specifically, with the formation of middle-class masculinity. In turn, travelling abroad opened up a space onto which the precarious concepts of sensibility and its manifold intersections with the domestically powerful categories of class, gender and national identification could be mapped. 4 1 Monthly Review 39 (1768): 434. My article sets out to explore the complex intersections between mobility, sentimentality and gendered identity in 18 th -century sentimental 2 Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800. Authorship, Gender, and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 51f. 3 James Chandler, “The Languages of Sentiment,” Textual Practice 22.1 (2008): 22. 4 Turner 52. B IRGIT N EUMANN 156 travelogues. Practices of mobility, I argue, are central to the range and the limits of human agency, entailing and, indeed, producing ideologically charged notions of gender, nation and class. The focus of my paper is on the European travelogue. Considering that the 18 th century was an age of global exploration, one could in fact argue that these travelogues were quite restricted in their spatial scope. 5 Imperial explorations and the travel literature they spawned were certainly crucial to English people’s concepts of space and concomitant notions of nation and Britishness. 6 European travelogues, by contrast, could hardly offer their readership the thrill of the new; by the middle of the century Europe was well-travelled and the noteworthy places to be visited by every serious Grand tourist have been described all too often. 7 Yet, perhaps exactly because of the limited geographical scope, the predictable itineraries and the repetitive spatial structure, European travelogues offered manifold opportunities for explorations of the self and for self-conscious engagements with mobility. Indeed, while much of 18 th -century literature concerned with global exploration was deeply steeped in Enlightenment empiricism, the European travelogue evolved into a site for writers to explore the expressive and personalized potentials of autodiegesis: 8 “In this branch of the genre,” Katherine Turner points out, “narrative ingenuity, even authorial oddity, become crucial components of the text’s interest.” 9 Arguably, this interest in narrative ingenuity is especially manifest in the sentimental travelogue because the indulgence in feeling, the display of originality and even the flaunting of eccentricity are typical elements of the genre. It is significant that this emphasis upon individuality and the increasing interiority of experience also affected practices of mobility. The sentimental traveller strategically leaves the beaten tracks of Europe, looking for places where he can cultivate his individuality and parade his sensibility. 10 5 Turner 21. Moreover, he is not so much interested in sites but in the experience of mobility and the surprises of the unknown. In this respect, the new concepts of mobility propelled by sentimental travels do indeed reflect larger cultural changes of an increasingly modern society, in which mobility is experienced as neither necessary nor arbitrary, but as an open process. To understand 6 Kathleen Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” A New Imperial History, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 10. 7 James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After (1660-1840),” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Young (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 37- 52. 8 Turner 21. 9 Turner 24. 10 Turner 92. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 157 more fully what is at stake here, I will briefly contextualize the emergence of the sentimental travelogue within 18 th -century British travel literature. If during the first half of the 18 th century, travels to Europe were largely an aristocratic practice and shaped by the ideological assumptions of the classical Grand Tour, during the second half travellers of the middle class explored Europe in increasing numbers. 11 Often, these travels to the Continent followed an established itinerary and were thus structured as a sequence of noteworthy places, which could give order to experience and organize movement. 12 As is well known, many of these travelogues were notorious for their patriotic and xenophobic inclinations. Just think, for instance, of Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, in which the stereotypical construction of the French other becomes a powerful means for defining British national character. There was a larger social context and resonance to these patterns of mobility, namely social forces that determined which sights must be seen. The very act of visiting these attractions functioned as a confirmation of a range of social, economic and aesthetic values that, by and large, reinforced the dominant assumptions of the upper class. 13 Like many of his contemporaries, Smollett’s persona seizes almost every opportunity to denigrate the French, among which he believes to have observed “the same spirit of idleness and dissipation […] among every class of people.” 14 In particular, the nature and effects of French tyranny in relation to British liberty and prosperity are a persistent theme of the Travels. Smollett’s persona might indeed be one of many who, as Jeremy Black points out, could return to Britain as “better-informed xenophobes.” 15 To be sure, mobility can promote a heightened tolerance of cultural difference and entail openness to unfamiliar cultures; 16 What Smollett’s and other travelogues of the age show is that travel literature was far from being “straightforwardly about ‘abroad.’” yet, in the 18 th -century, travelling abroad, in particular male and middle-class travelling, was frequently a patriotic endeavour that helped fashion British national identity against the background of what was constructed as typically foreign. 17 11 Turner 55. As a matter of fact, for many authors travel literature provided first and foremost an opportunity to participate in political debates about the internal workings of British 12 Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 4-33. 13 Birgit Neumann, Die Rhetorik der Nation in britischer Literatur und anderen Medien des 18. Jahrhunderts (Trier, WVT, 2009), 130-141. 14 Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, 1766, ed. Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 49. 15 Black 186. 16 Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 6. 17 Turner, 10. B IRGIT N EUMANN 158 society - in particular the classand gender-based struggle for political rights in the emerging British nation. 18 Claiming more and more insistently to exemplify ideal notions of Britishness, middle-class writers frequently exploited the genre of travel writing to engage in some of the most hotly debated public issues at a time of constant political change. In her excellent study British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800, Katherine Turner has shown that middle-class formulations of nationalist xenophobia were not least a means of challenging the allegedly un-patriotic cosmopolitanism of the British aristocracy and thus for boosting middle-class claims to political supremacy: aristocratic travellers were consistently stigmatized as “effeminate,” while the middle-class traveller was eager to throw into high relief his “manly Britishness.” 19 Because the category of effeminacy was also employed in the imperial context to denigrate non-European others, the European travelogue was instrumental to the imperial projects of the age, ultimately producing the “domestic subject” 20 Around 1770, British travel literature underwent a change: the typically xenophobic accounts of foreign commercial and political culture were complemented and challenged by accounts that explore intercultural encounters and gauge the more personalized realms of manners and morals. The focus was now on morals, the status of women, social institutions, poverty and social inequality, and, of course, on the exploration of inner feelings. of British cosmopolitanism. 21 This shift was congruent with the increasing cultural importance of sensibility and its complex relations to aristocratic and middle-class concepts of virtue, social privilege and moral worth. 22 Broadly speaking, the sentimental travelogue narrows the focus from the objects and sites of the traveller’s observations to the subjective experience of Significantly, the sentimental mode of travelling and the refocusing of theme gave rise to new concepts and patterns of mobility, which also opened up new possibilities for individual and national identification. 18 Turner 10. 19 Turner 19. See also Hunt who stresses: “Middling moralists obsessively identified traits that were alleged to be aristocratic (luxury, interest in things French, lack of application, moral laxity) with softness and effeminacy. Conversely they identified any and all values alleged to be non-aristocratic (plain speaking, usefulness, perseverance in the face of adversity, rationality, systematic pursuit of virtue) with masculinity.” Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort. Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1996), 71. 20 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 21 Turner 29. 22 Robert Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne and the Theatrics of Virtue,” The New Eighteenth Century. Theory - Politics - English Literature, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 212. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 159 travel and mobility. 23 It registers multiple forms of mental and territorial space, of motion and emotion, which cannot be kept apart. In contrast to many earlier 18 th -century travellers, who knew from extensive reading which sites to visit on their continental travels, 24 the sentimental traveller valued unexpected sights and delighted in digressions and sidetracks. The sequence of sights that structured previous travels to the continent is thus transformed into a loose series of personalized encounters and subjective impressions. 25 The sentimental traveller thus embodies a way of moving that is dynamic, non-linear, but not undirected. And while many of the early travellers relied on classical tropes to describe their experiences on foreign soil, the new emphasis on first-hand experience produces more introspective, emotional, playful and self-reflexive forms of travel writing. The exploration of the outside world gradually recedes behind the exploration of the feelings and “the motions of the body.” 26 The sentimental traveller narrates in more and more detail the processes of perception, reflection and discursivisation of experience, which in turn creates and confirms his sense of self. Sentimental travel is therefore also about “the surprise of movement, the sense of not quite knowing where the journey will end or even where it began.” 27 According to this view, travel entails not only the crossing of geographical boundaries but also the crossing of the boundaries of the self, the transgression of limits that invite various forms of destabilization and displacement. The sentimental hero, therefore, writes not only the world, “but also himself from the perspective of the moving individual.” 28 It is not necessary here to give another summary of the discourse of sensibility. Let me just pinpoint some aspects that are pertinent to the analysis of sentimental travelogues. Sensibility, the affective display of benevolence and Reacting against fixed social assumptions, these new practices of mobility destabilized more traditional concepts of identity and authority, replacing stasis and telos with relationality, difference, flexibility and provisionality. 23 Neumann 144. 24 See the following complaint put forward in the Critical Review: “Every one that goes abroad, now a-days, whether for health, or pleasure, for idleness or business, seems to think themselves called upon by the public, to render it a minute account of their occupations, avocations, observations, and lucubrations, during their pilgrimage. Nay some, I have been informed, have so well prepared themselves for this work, before hand, that they have written half their book ere they set out, in order to save themselves the trouble of lugging the one they had copied from, about with them, from state to stage.” The Critical Review 42 (1776): 196. 25 Manfred Pfister, Laurence Sterne (London: Northcote House, 2001), 82. 26 Pfister 73. 27 Greenblatt 18f. 28 Ingo Berensmeyer and Christoph Ehland, “Patterns of Mobility: Introduction,” Anglistentag 2010 Saarbrücken. Proceedings, eds. Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker (Trier: WVT, 2011), 292. B IRGIT N EUMANN 160 generosity, developed in the early 18 th century as a series of literary and philosophical formations that describe the ways in which middleand upperclass men can act out their ‘natural’ and, by implication, benign, feelings for the benefit of their fellow creatures. Sensibility is, at least partly, a masculinist set of behaviour and attitudes, which, whether consciously or not, relegates women to the status of victims. 29 At the same time, however, the discourse of sensibility mystifies masculine sensitivity as a positive influence, as an expression of a natural sympathy. Moreover, the ideology of sentiment also relies on relatively conservative and maybe, as Robert Markley claims, even essentialist concepts of class relations. Indeed, it often identifies victims of social inequality with a distinctively “feminine powerlessness.” 30 As such, the ideology of sensibility and the new form of bourgeois subjectivity also reflected a certain anxiety about virtue that was no longer primarily located in the public sphere, but in a newly privatized social context, i.e. in the domestic sphere, where men were largely defined by their emotional responses. 31 In what follows, my project is to trace the interfaces but also tensions that existed between the discourse of sentimentality and practices of travelling. Crucial questions for my analysis are the following: (1) How does the increasing emphasis upon individuality and sentimentality impinge on practices of mobility? (2) And, in turn, how does mobility affect the individuality of the sentimental traveller? (3) How is mobility experienced and how does literature give shape to ‘sentimental’ practices of mobility? (4) And - presuming that the narrative of the self is allied with a narrative of the nation - do sentimental practices of mobility give rise to new concepts of national identification? Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, is generally credited with being the first sentimental travelogue. Its enthusiastic reception set off a veritable wave of sentimental trips, not only in England but also on the continent. It is this travelogue that will be at the centre of the following analysis of the interplay between mobility and sentimentality. 2. Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey - Sentimentality as (Imaginative) Mobility One of Yorick’s numerous expositions on his approach to travel is addressed to a French count, whom the traveller-narrator visits at Versailles. Emphati- 29 Markley 212. 30 Markley 212. 31 Susan Manning, “Sensibility,” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830, eds. Thomas Keymer and John Dee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 92f. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 161 cally setting himself off from previous travellers, Yorick assures the count that he has “not come to spy the nakedness of the land” (SJ 115) 32 But I could wish, continued I, to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by - and therefore am I come. […] It is for this reason, Monsieur le Compte,” continues Yorick, “that I have not seen the Palais royal - nor the Luxembourg - nor the Façade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches (SJ 116). ; nor is he interested in the French works of art. What he is interested in are hearts, particularly female hearts: Women and particularly female hearts, Yorick claims, offer more fascinating sights than the usual tourist attractions. Rather than wasting his time visiting and describing once again what has already been visited and described so often, Yorick seeks personal encounters and affective immediacy. Yorick’s narrative is therefore not so much punctuated by ‘sights’; rather, his travels interiorize external events and spaces. Though travelling through France, Yorick’s “road,” as Virginia Woolf put it, leads “often through his own mind, and his chief adventures are with the emotions of his heart.” 33 As many scholars have convincingly argued, Sterne’s sentimentalization of travel is at least partly designed to counter the general xenophobia of many earlier travelogues, such as Smollett’s Travels. Smollett appears in Sterne’s Journey under the soubriquet of the “learned S MELFUNGUS ” (SJ 39), an infamous caricature, together with another, quite bad-humoured traveller, namely “Mundungus” (SJ 41), most likely Samuel Sharp, the author of Letters from Italy (1766). From the very beginning, Yorick’s redefinition of travelling, the attempt to position himself as a ‘sentimental traveller,’ goes hand in hand with a revision of previous practices of mobility, specifically the practice of travelling “straight on” (SJ 41). According to Yorick, xenophobic travellers, such as Smelfungus, simply keep to the beaten track of the Grand Tour, “looking neither to his right hand or his left, lest Love or Pity should seduce him out of his road” (SJ 41). Studying all the sights with eyes “discoloured and distorted” by “the spleen and jaundice” (SJ 39), the xenophobic traveller even carps at the Pantheon and the Venus de Medicis. Predictably, all such a traveller can come up with is “the account of his miserable feelings” and of sights all too well-known. Yorick, however, is a traveller of a different kind, “altogether of a different cast from any of [his] fore-runners” (SJ 16), as he 32 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, 1768, eds. Melvyn New and W.G. Day (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006). In the following A Sentimental Journey will be abbreviated to SJ and references will be given directly in the text. 33 Virginia Woolf, “The Sentimental Journey,” The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932), 36. B IRGIT N EUMANN 162 proudly puts it. Not so much the world, but the capacity of the world to stir his sensations and affect his body motivates his travels: “I declare,” proclaims Yorick, “that was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections” (SJ 39). Rather than aiming at the neutrality of the detached and isolated observer, which was the ideal promoted by the Royal Society and realized in many earlier 18 th -century travelogues, 34 Yorick seeks interaction, “affective response,” 35 From the very beginning, A Sentimental Journey satirically questions the conventional understanding of travel as being designed to gather useful knowledge, thereby also taking issue with aristocratic concepts of travel, their emphasis upon classical learning and concomitant notions of male authority and gentlemanly superiority. In classical travelogues, most famously in Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), the mastery of the foreign culture, i.e. its appropriation and incorporation into classical learning, emerged as a crucial precondition of cultivated manliness. The adaptation of “the twofold position of classical author and modern observer” reciprocity and immediate pleasure. Mobility, in the sentimental travelogue, thus becomes multidimensional, functioning as a catalyst of the exploration of highly personalized and interactional spaces. 36 offered the traveller occasion to appropriate the objects of his sight and recontextualise them within a narrative of the self that was closely linked to a narrative of the British nation. 37 Although Yorick also encodes masculinity in the language of the subject, 38 I am of opinion, That a man would act as wisely, if he could prevail upon himself to live contented without foreign knowledge or foreign improvements, especially if he lives in a country that has no absolute want of either - and indeed, much grief of heart has it oft and many a time cost me, when I have observed how many a foul step the inquisitive Traveller has measured to see sights and look into discoveries; all which, as Sancho Pança said to Don Quixote, they might have seen dryshod at home. […] - Where then, my dear countrymen, are you going - (SJ 17). he programmatically challenges the identity-forming capacities of classical learning. In contemplating the chances of obtaining “useful knowledge and real improvements” (SJ 16) from travel, he declares: 34 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 38. 35 Peter de Bolla, “The Visibility of Visuality,” Vision in Context, eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 69. 36 Susanne Scholz, “The Rites of Gentlemen: Englishness, Masculinity and the Grand Tour,” Anglistentag 2001. Proceedings, eds. Dieter Katovsky et al. (Trier: WVT, 2001), 331. 37 Scholz 331. 38 Penelope Wilson, “Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader,” Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1982), 71. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 163 This final question is addressed to two Englishmen who have approached the carriage to find out why it had been thrown into motion. As a matter of fact, the carriage had been thrown in motion because of Yorick’s agitation upon writing his preface. Apparently, in the sentimental travelogue, mobility and movement do not merely concern the distances traversed by travellers; rather, quite literally, they refer to the capacity of being moved. If Yorick’s journey can still be classified as a Bildungsreise, its aim is indeed not the accumulation of facts but a sentimental education. 39 Time and again, A Sentimental Journey capitalizes on the close connection between motion and emotion and, taking up Adam Smith’s (1759; Theory of Moral Sentiments) account of imaginative sympathy, figures “the practice of sympathy as a kind of imaginative mobility.” Hence, he explains to the Count de B****: “’tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of N ATURE , and those affections which arise out of her, which make us love each other - and the world, better than we do” (SJ 117). 40 In line with Smith’s understanding of feeling as being founded on mobility, A Sentimental Journey stages “a paradoxical play between, on the one hand, the virtual representation of sentiments occasioned by actual travel and, on the other, the actual exercise of virtual travel in sentiment.” 41 As James Chandler has shown, much of the allure of the sentimental travelogue lies in the way Sterne fuses the themes of travel and affection. 42 Central to this entanglement is the figure of the vehicle, which relates to both the realm of transportation and the experience of communication. In this respect, it is crucial to note just how closely Yorick’s sentimental adventures and the ensuing emotional economy are interconnected with the chosen means of transportation, arguably a mobile space in its own right. 43 Contrary to most travellers, Yorick did not take his own carriage to Europe 44 39 Pfister 81. but looks for an appropriate vehicle in France. From the beginning Yorick seeks a vehicle that is in “tolerable harmony with [his] feelings” (SJ 40 Chandler 26. 41 Chandler 26. 42 It is in this context that Yorick’s famous paean to sensibility can best be understood: “Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! […] external fountain of our feelings! - ‘tis here I trace thee - and this is thy divinity which stirs within me - not that, in some sad and sickening moments, ‘my soul shrinks back upon herself, and startles at destruction’ - mere pomp of words! - but that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself - all comes from thee, great - great Sensorium of the world! , which vibrates, if a hair of our heads falls upon the ground” (SJ 162-63). The passage is a description of what it means to be moved by sentimentality and how this in-between state relates to the capacity of moving beyond ourselves. Cf. Chandler 25. 43 Danielle Bobker, “Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental Journey,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 248. 44 Black 51. B IRGIT N EUMANN 164 12). Barely arrived in Calais, Yorick spots a somewhat run-down chaise, a Desobligeant (literally meaning ‘antisocial’), which “hit[s his] fancy at first sight” (SJ 12). Following the footsteps of “many a peripatetic philosopher” (SJ 13), he gets into this single-seater vehicle and starts to compose his preface. The preface he then writes in the stationary vehicle is dry and pseudoscientific, largely driven by taxonomic principles. 45 Seeking to classify different “causes of travelling” (SJ 14), he soon finds himself distinguishing between various types of travellers, thus flimsily switching the terms of comparison. Acknowledging the awkwardness of his preface, he is convinced that “it would have been better […] in a Vis a Vis” (SJ 17). It is clear, then, that the Desobligeant and Vis à Vis not only refer to different coach models but are intricately bound up with questions of sociability, communication and interpersonal experience: while the Desobligeant makes contact with other people nearly impossible, the Vis à Vis, etymologically sharing roots with vision and visage, allows for mutual observation and conversation, for intimate, albeit semi-public interaction with strangers, for temporary and incidental close-up encounters. 46 According to Douglas Patey, face-to-face contact and the sympathy it enables were central to the dynamics of the sentimental that emerged in the second half of the 18 th century. 47 Approximately the next dozen vignettes, some of which take place in the Remise, i.e. the magazine of carriages, are concerned with Yorick’s search for an appropriate vehicle for his journey. If therefore, Yorick’s journey is indeed meant to be a sentimental education, then he will have to leave the spatial confines of the Desobligeant. 48 45 Tanya Radford, “Seeing Feeling and Frustrating Reading in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey,” Word and Image in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Christina Ionescu (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 160. Upon his second attempt at finding a vehicle for his journey, Yorick sees “another old tatter’d Desobligeant” (SJ 34). But, having become well aware of his sentimental preoccupations, he now approaches it almost reluctantly, admitting: “[N]otwithstanding it was the exact picture of that which had hit my fancy so much in the coach-yard but an hour before - the very sight of it stirr’d up a disagreeable sensation within me now; and I thought ‘twas a churlish beast into whose heart the idea could first enter, to construct such as machine” (SJ 34). Little wonder that the carriage that Yorick eventually buys is not a Desobligeant, but one that is big enough to seat two persons, a carriage that invites flirtation and close-up contact. Tellingly, this vehicle is the setting of his first flirtation with a French lady, Madame de L***, and seems to be ideally suited to enjoy circu- 46 Bobker 246. 47 Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984). 48 Chandler 29. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 165 lating desire and “lust in transit.” 49 Rather than inviting solitary speculation and classification, the second, more sociable carriage offers Yorick a space in which he can indulge in the “erotics of mobile proximity,” 50 permitting him to respond to subtle movements, words and gestures 51 and thus to write the kind of sentimental narrative that is shaped by emotionally alluring sights and stimulating physical encounters. 52 Indeed, coaches in the 18 th century were heavily charged with erotic associations and had a notorious reputation as hotbeds for flirtation. Many male commentators were thrilled by the spectatorial possibilities of the coach and the physical closeness it allowed, envisioning the stage-coach journey as an opportunity for sensational seduction. The German satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg saw in English stage-coach journeys first and foremost an occasion for “a dangerous exchange of glances but often also for a scandalous entanglement of legs causing a giggling in both parties and a confusion of souls and thought.” 53 Given the emphasis upon subjectivity, it is not surprising that Yorick chafes at the constraints of established itineraries, which used to structure travels to the continent. The close association of stage-coaches with flirtation is also suggested by “A Sentimental Journey, by a Lady,” a short piece in The Lady’s Magazine from 1770, which graphically depicts a stage-coach journey of “two women and a Frenchman” as a compilation of asterisks. Yorick’s encounter with Madame de L*** evokes these associations, delicately enforcing the reputation of the carriage as a vehicle for lovemaking. 54 The sentimental traveller strategically disrupts seemingly fixed paths. Perspective, perception, digression and coincidence become the crucial trajectories of his experiences abroad, thus also countering the ideal of a disinterested contemplation, which was central to early 18 th century epistemologies and constructions of male authority. 55 Yorick’s itinerary through France is essentially guided by affection and accordingly, “his movements respond to his being moved.” 56 49 Bobker 252. His indulgence in sentimental feeling disrupts the linear teleology of travel and thus ultimately de-centres prevalent mental topographies of France, topographies that, for British readers, were largely predicated on the established itinerary of the Grand Tour. Though Yorick still follows the trend of Continental travels to move from North to South, he constantly allows himself to leave the beaten tracks and to 50 Bobker 254. 51 Bobker 253. 52 Radford 162. 53 Lichtenberg quoted in Bobker 255. 54 Pfister 81. 55 Scholz 333. 56 Chandler 26. B IRGIT N EUMANN 166 be sidetracked by curiosity, coincidence and desire. 57 He even concedes that “there is a fatality in it - I seldom go to the place I set out for” (SJ 78). The constant digressions disrupt any sense of directed progress, up to the point where Yorick breaks off his travels before actually arriving in Italy - the ultimate destination of his trip. Samuel Johnson once remarked that “[a] man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.” 58 That Yorick never makes it to Italy does not do harm to his masculinity; rather, his break with established spatial practices hints at the development of continental travels from a study of conventional sights to a narrative of personal adventure, subjective introspection and dynamic, non-linear movement. According to Manfred Pfister, “Yorick drifts, rather than travels across France” 59 Space, then, is not simply a fixed setting in which to move around; rather, the sentimental traveller creates his own space “in relation to himself by means of his movements.” and so, as Yorick declares, “interests his heart in every thing, and […], having eyes to see, what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on” (SJ 38-39). 60 The sentimental traveller’s gaze therefore has to adapt to a situation quite differently from the classical perspective. Although Yorick, in line with the Enlightenment notion of empirical verification by eye-sight, still embraces the mind’s capacity to turn sight into object, 61 The 18 th century has frequently been characterized as a period “obsessed with questions concerning spectatorial comportment and behaviour.” subject and object of the visual relation are conceived as dynamic and mobile. It has to accommodate abrupt shifts and unexpected changes in the visual field. Thus Yorick can state: “I count little of the many things I see pass at broad noon day, in large and open streets. - Nature is shy, and hates to act before spectators; but in such an unobserved corner, you sometimes see a single short scene of her’s worth all the sentiments of a dozen French plays compounded together” (SJ 148). 62 According to the Royal Society, the traveller is first and foremost a spectator and, as such, should turn his gaze to unresponsive objects. 63 57 Chloe Chard, “Introduction,” Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830, eds. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 15; Pfister 82. Jonathan Crary’s 58 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson. Vol. 3 (London: Baldwin, 1799), 34. 59 Pfister 82. 60 Berensmeyer and Ehland 292. 61 Scholz 331. 62 de Bolla 74. 63 Christian Huck, “Seeing other People? Travel, Writing and the Senses,” Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen. Proceedings, eds. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt (Trier: WVT, 2009), 229. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 167 (1990) analysis of 19 th -century visual culture famously contrasts the subjectivized and embodied vision he deems typical of the age with an earlier ‘scopic regime’ that, much like the camera obscura, strives to passively reflect the visual outside world. Crary associates this earlier visual attitude with “objectivity” and “suppression of subjectivity.” 64 Objective viewing only functions if the embodied subjectivity of the viewer is erased and the movement of deixis in the perceived objects is actively negated. Yet passages such as the one quoted above suggest that, far from being pervasive in the 18 th century, this objective observation was challenged by a form of vision that favoured sensitivity, responsiveness, affective immediacy and expressiveness. 65 Such a “sentimental vision” 66 includes the physical body of the viewer into acts of seeing and relies on a connection between practices of seeing and emotional engagement. 67 Crucial to the relation of motion and emotion is, of course, Sterne’s refashioning of the picaresque mode, which he connects to the ethical premises of the sentimental novel. Hence, it tries to see through the external and the superficial and seeks to establish an emotionally charged relation between the viewer and an object, frequently other people’s suffering. 68 The Spanish picaresque novels - from Lazarillo de Tormes (1553) to Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) - provided the blueprint for translating narrative and adventure into a road show, i.e., into “a loosely organized series of adventures along a road that does not follow a predetermined route, takes surprising or seemingly random turns and brings the traveller in contact with characters from all walks of life.” 69 To be sure, as a sentimental traveller, Yorick is not characterized by the classical rogue’s cunning. 70 Yorick is, however, at least in some occasions, a picaresque hero, who takes delight in drifting from place to place, in surprises, the unexpected and the comic. 71 His purpose is less to reach a destination but to seek distraction and digression. Travelling abroad, he consciously gives up the security he enjoys at home to get involved into ever new “adventures” (SJ 25, 38), as he repeatedly points out. 72 Yet, at the same time, A Sentimental Journey refashions the picaresque narrative by reformulating the picaro’s travels in terms of the discourse of sensibility, the ‘sensorium of the world,’ and the soul. 73 64 Crary 9. Sentimentality is thus also to be understood as the capacity to go beyond our- 65 Radford 155. 66 de Bolla 70. 67 Radford 157. 68 Chandler 25. 69 Pfister 83. 70 Pfister 83. 71 Markley 228. 72 Pfister 83. 73 Chandler 26. B IRGIT N EUMANN 168 selves, i.e., as “a kind of imaginative mobility.” 74 In A Sentimental Journey, practices of mobility thus effectively challenge the sentimental cliché of the priority of private spaces by thrusting the hero into a foreign world. 75 Rather than keeping his distance from the other and contending himself with sweeping generalizations about the French, Yorick persistently seeks “contact, communication and communion” 76 with the people he meets. The numerous ‘grissets’ and ‘filles de chambre,’ monks, peasants, Madame de L*** and the Marquesina di F***, the poor Friar Lorenzo, Maria’s little dog and the captive starling - they engage Yorick’s affections and give him an opportunity to perform the power of sympathy and thus to demonstrate his moral worth. To a certain extent, one can indeed argue that the sentimental travelogue substitutes the aristocratic practice of collecting art by the “middle-class commodification of sentiment,” 77 a shift which can be seen as a reflection of the rise of commercial values towards the middle of the century. Sentimental vision allows the traveller to assert his status as a British consumer of foreign spectacle, mostly the spectacle of the suffering of the poor and innocent. Broadly speaking, this vision represents “distance appropriated,” 78 i.e. it enables the observer to identify the objects of his pity, endow them with subjective meaning and recontextualise them within his narrative of personal identity. The other is thus placed “within an intimate distance; space is transformed into interiority, into ‘personal’ space.” 79 This consumerist acquisitiveness (or voyeuristic consumption), which divorces the objects of sight from their context, is, as Susan Stewart has put it in a different context, “symptomatic of the more general cultural imperialism that is tourism’s stock in trade.” 80 It is clear, then, that sensibility in A Sentimental Journey can hardly be viewed “in terms of selfless philanthropic engagement.” 81 Although Yorick constantly emphasizes human fellowship across borders and the “great - great Sensorium of the world” (SJ 163), he persistently flaunts cultural differences and parades his national identity. Travelling to France offers Yorick ever new occasions for pitting his own British identity against what he constructs as distinctively French. 82 74 Chandler 26. The French, as he explains in a conversation about national character with the Count de B***, may be “the most polish’d 75 Markley 228. 76 Pfister 82. 77 Turner 90. 78 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 147. 79 Stewart 147. 80 Stewart 147. 81 Thomas Keymer, A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 90. 82 Pfister 78. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 169 people in the world” (SJ 114), and they may even be “renown’d for sentiment and fine feelings” (SJ 4). Yet their sentiments, according to Yorick, are more a matter of social convention than of true feelings. And the French are without a doubt polished and polite, but “to an excess” (SJ 125) that runs counter to “the politesse de cœur, which inclines men more to humane actions, than courteous ones” (SJ 125). By contrast, the English, according to Yorick, still display “that distinct variety and originality of character, which distinguishes them, not only from each other, but from all the world besides” (SJ 126). Thus, although A Sentimental Journey does derive much of its appeal from its emphasis on universal humanity, Yorick also uses the discourse of sentimentality to stage a distinctively British singularity or eccentricity. 83 The sentimentalization of travelling is indeed no guarantee for escaping the snares of xenophobic nationalism, however much its figuration, narration and dramatization have become associated with alternative models of identification. It is crucial to note that the parading of Yorick’s singularity has a political dimension, for it serves to highlight the political liberty of Britain, upon which the myth of individuality relies. The emphasis upon British individuality celebrates genuinely middle-class formulations of national distinctiveness and thus works against the presumed anonymity of aristocratic cosmopolitanism. 84 Thus, while his cultivation of individuated relationships stresses the integrity of the individual and at times even promotes an egalitarian pathos, Yorick also makes it clear that the British sentimental traveller enjoys a unique position, thanks to his sensibility and political freedom, to indulge in such individuality. 85 If travel is about moving, then the travelogue is about translating practices of mobility into narrative, thus transforming the spectator position into a position of narrative authority. 86 However, the sentimental aesthetics of mobility, the meandering and drifting, the digressions and transgressions resist translation into any linear narration. The sentimental traveller’s patterns of mobility find their most suitable reflection in the fragmentary, provisional structure that is characteristic of many sentimental travelogues. “The sentimental text,” Pfister points out, “is by the very nature fragmented and episodic - a series of momentary transports and frictions rather than a continuous plot.” 87 83 Pfister 78. This sentimental aesthetics of mobility has a critical thrust, for it questions concepts of (narrative) progress and (Whiggish) teleology. Even though Yorick implicitly defines his travels as a Bildungsreise, which aims at the improvement of his manners (“I […] shall learn better manners as 84 Turner 97. 85 Turner 92. 86 Scholz 331. 87 Pfister 98. B IRGIT N EUMANN 170 I get along,” SJ 11), his meandering never morphs into the “teleological trajectory of a Bildungsroman.” 88 In this respect, the reinscription of the sentimental novel in the picaresque mode is indeed suggestive because it hints at the fact that sensibility cannot be reconciled with notions of moral improvement and socioeconomic progress promoted by the Whiggish ideology (e.g. of Addison, Steele, Locke). 89 Ultimately, Yorick’s travels can reach no destination; all they can provide is a “repetitive tableau” 90 of sentimental gestures. It is therefore perfectly fitting that the last episode in Yorick’s journey again takes him on a sidetrack when a rock blocks his way between St Michael and Madane. The sentimental journey comes to a halt, but remains a fragment: it ends just as it has begun, namely as a fragment in the middle of a sentence. 91 3. A Sentimental Journey as a Travelling Text In terms of structure, then, the sentimental travelogue works against measure and teleological narratives of progress, illustrating that there is indeed nothing necessary about specific practices of mobility. And maybe this is one of the most important cultural contributions of the sentimental travelogue to the spatial imaginary: to embrace the fragmentary and to resist the lure of teleological closure. Works of art, such as Sterne’s travelogue, are not just artifacts, but also agents. The cultural power of Sterne’s fictional travel account manifests itself forcefully in its influence on cultural patterns of mobility: Sterne’s travelogue is not only about travel, rather it is also a travelling text itself, i.e. a text that has been translated into many different cultural contexts and appropriated to different ends. The enthusiastic reception of A Sentimental Journey, also propelled by William Holland’s highly popular compilation The Beauties of Sterne (1782), set off a veritable wave of sentimental trips through Europe and a tide of imitations, which did not cease until the early 19 th century. The widespread circulation of the travelogue is expressed by Matthew Carey, who noted in 1810 that “few works, if any, were ever received with more unbounded applause, than the Sentimental Journey. Its circulation was immense. It produced a revolution in the public taste.” 92 88 Pfister 98. The influence of Sterne’s sentimental journey on the spatial imaginary is also pointed out by the Monthly 89 Markley 229. 90 Markley 229. 91 Pfister 98. 92 Carey quoted in W.B. Gerard, “’Betwixt One Passion and Another’: Continuations of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, 1769-1820,” On Second Thought: Updating the Eighteenth-Century Text, eds. Debra Taylor Bourdeau and Elizabeth Kraft (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007), 124. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 171 Review in 1779: “Trips, and Tours, and Excursions, and Sentimental Journeys, are become so much the ton, that every rambler, who can write (tolerably or intolerably) assumes the pen, and gives the Public a journal of the occurrences and remarks to which his peregrinations have given birth.” 93 The cultural potential of Sterne’s travelogue to shape concepts of mobility is therefore not only located in itself. Rather, it also results from its reception, including all the appreciative commentaries, parodies and imitations it has given rise to. Together, these undeniably provided powerful cultural frames for patterns and concepts of mobility. 94 In Great Britain, over forty continuations of A Sentimental Journey had been published by 1810. 95 Frequently, these continuations were primarily concerned with either erotic ‘cases of delicacy’ 96 or with matters of style, ignoring the text’s profound engagement with concepts of mobility, individuality and otherness. 97 The Critical Review criticizes a 1788 continuation for its abundant use of “breaks, and dashes, and scanty pages, in all which the imitator infinitely exceeds the original.” 98 What emerges from these travelogues is a powerful association of motion with emotion, of movement and being moved, of sensibility with Britishness and (mostly middle-class) masculinity. The sentimental performances of travelling are translated into a narrative of self, which is closely linked to a narrative of the British nation, envisioning the imagined community as a community of British gentlemen endowed with a superior sensibility. Signifi- Other appropriations, such as Samuel Paterson’s travel narrative Another Traveller! (published in 1768 and 1769, under the pseudonym ‘Coriat Junior’), Patrick Brydone’s A Tour through Sicily and Malta (2 vols., 1773), Thomas Cogan’s John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman (1776-8), Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Travels for the Heart. Written in France (2 vols., 1777) and the unsigned 1782 essay “The Oxonian’s Sentimental Trip to London” tap the possibilities of sentimental travel more creatively, i.e. use it for negotiations of class, gender and nation. What we find in most of these travelogues are the typical ‘sentimental’ patterns of mobility, i.e. frequent disruptions of linear and teleological movement that give way to digressions, coincidence and seemingly random encounters with humble foreigners (frequently idealized objects of pity). 93 Monthly Review 60 (1779): 191. 94 The anonymous author of Observations in a Journey to Paris, 1776 (2 vols., 1777), for instance, compares his visit of the Franciscan chapel at Calais with Yorick’s experiences. 95 Gerard 124. 96 See John Hall-Stevenson’s Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, Continued (1769), whose first chapter is titled “The Case of Delicacy, compleated .” John Hall-Stevenson, Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, Continued. To which is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Sterne (London: Bladon, 1769). 97 Turner 101. 98 The Critical Review 66 (1788): 584. B IRGIT N EUMANN 172 cantly, then, the “moving spectacle” 99 of sympathy and benevolence leaves the assumption of British superiority largely intact. Poverty, social inequality and the suffering of others are not depicted “as the result of any specific economic or political conditions, any authoritarian strategies of repression.” 100 Rather, they are mainly presented as opportunities to demonstrate the natural virtue of British travellers. One could argue that sentimentality, which enabled British gentlemen to stage their individuality in terms of (upward social) mobility, relies on the social immobilization of others, namely of the idealized objects of sentimental pity. 101 4. Female Travellers and Commonsensical Britishness Indeed, this might be one reason why travelling was so popular among ‘men of feeling’: Abroad, the traveller’s agency is necessarily limited and these restraints also free him from the responsibility of actively tackling social injustices and questioning his role in the economic and political system. The association of mobility with sentimentality, middle-class masculinity and sexual sympathy posed particular challenges for female travellers, who began to publish their travel experiences in increasing numbers from the 1770s onwards. 102 Women travel writers were well aware of the restrictions that the discourse of sentimentality - in alliance with the torrent of conduct books and normative gender codes - imposed upon them. Inevitably, these writers were deeply concerned with the question of who can travel and on what terms, thus discussing their mobility within a framework of social in/ stability. Most female travellers felt compelled to apologize for the very act of travelling. 103 99 Pfister 91. Mary Ann Hanway, for instance, who travelled to the Western Islands of Scotland, tries to compensate for her mobility by repeatedly stressing the fixity or stability of her mind, thus attempting to strike a balance between mobility and immobility. She claims that however far she travels, her “mind still remains untraveled, and clings fondly to that dear, 100 Markley 211. 101 See Markley 227-8, who points out: “The theatrics of sentimental virtue preclude any action to alleviate the suffering of the poor beyond doling out money and selfconsciously recording the amount to keep one’s accounts in order in the ‘divine’ ledger book of bourgeois morality. In this sense, sentimental travel also served the interests of the male middle class, by dissimulating societal contradictions and pretending to sympathize with social outsiders in an increasingly exclusionary society. 102 Turner 19. Typically, conduct books criticized women’s passion for travelling and condemned it as a threat to social stability, domestic bliss and national virtue. 103 Birgit Neumann, “Gender und Nation in britischen Reiseberichten des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 58 (2008): 415. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 173 and domestic circle whom we have left over our own fire-sides.” 104 For her, mobility and travel are clearly transgressions, which need to be justified, or even imaginatively neutralized, by stressing her constant concern with the domestic sphere and her female virtue. 105 What is more: whereas most British male travellers employed the discourse of sentimentality to openly flaunt their individuality and thus exploited mobility for an often theatricalized performance of identity, female travel writers in the 1770s frequently attempted to suppress their subjectivity and to adopt the more detached perspective of an observer. Rather than embracing the reciprocity and affective immediacy of sentimental vision, female travel writers remained safely in the distant position and re-shifted the focus on the description of an exterior space. Attempting to impose order on the objects observed and describing them in a rather rational, matter-of-fact style, women travel writers of the 1770s, such as Anne Miller and Hanway, indeed “assert[…] a middle ground of reliable, commonsensical British womanhood” 106 and thus embrace attitudes that were previously encoded as typically ‘male.’ Cutting across binary distinctions of mobility and immobility, femininity and masculinity, these texts remind us of the very conflictedness of cultures of mobility and “the unequal politics of movement.” 107 They thus highlight that the role of travelogues and concomitant patterns of mobility in shaping concepts of British identities was indeed protean and multifaceted. 108 Female travelogues and female practices of mobility are a topic for a different paper. 109 Yet it would be wrong to exclude them from the discussion of mobility in sentimental travelogues. It would equally be wrong to understand them as the odd counterpart of male travelogues, as the “anomalous travellers in the public sphere.” 110 What 18 th -century female travelogues can remind us of is that mobility and its narrativization entail ideologically charged notions of gender, nation, class and religion, which bear on “the range and the limits of […] agency.” 111 104 Mary Ann Hanway, A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland. With Occasional Remarks on Dr. Johnson’s Tour: By a Lady (London: Fielding and Walke, 1776), vi. By examining the largely marginalized concepts and patterns of mobility that we find in specific 18 th -century 105 It might well be that these apologetic gestures have a pragmatic dimension, designed to neutralize anticipated criticism. 106 Turner 128. 107 Renate Brosch, “Moving Images - Mobile Viewers. Conceptualising Ways of Seeing in the Context of Mobility,” Moving Images - Mobile Viewers. 20 th Century Visuality, ed. Renate Brosch (Berlin: Lit, 2009), 15. 108 Turner 242. 109 For a very good overview see Turner, chapter 4. 110 Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference. An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), 107. 111 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “The Roads of the Novel,” The Novel. Vol. 2. Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 614. B IRGIT N EUMANN 174 travelogues, it becomes possible to reveal the dynamics and contradictions inherent in the era’s political landscape, which is not simply a static background against which mobility can be perceived, but an arena of active and conflicting forces. ‘Travels for the Heart’ 175 Works Cited Berensmeyer, Ingo, and Christoph Ehland. “Patterns of Mobility: Introduction.” Anglistentag 2010 Saarbrücken. Proceedings. Eds. Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker. Trier: WVT, 2011. 291-96. Black, Jeremy. The British and the Grand Tour. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Bobker, Danielle. “Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental Journey.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 243-266. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Vol. 3. London: Baldwin, 1799. Brosch, Renate. “Moving Images - Mobile Viewers. Conceptualising Ways of Seeing in the Context of Mobility.” Moving Images - Mobile Viewers. 20 th Century Visuality. Ed. Renate Brosch. Berlin: Lit, 2009. 7-25. Buzard, James. “The Grand Tour and After (1660-1840).” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 37-52. Chandler, James. “The Languages of Sentiment.” Textual Practice 22.1 (2008): 21-40. Chard, Chloe. “Introduction.” Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830. Eds. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. 1- 30. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. de Bolla, Peter. “The Visibility of Visuality.” Vision in Context. Eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay. London: Routledge, 1996. 63-82. Gerard, W.B. “’Betwixt One Passion and Another’: Continuations of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, 1769-1820.” On Second Thought: Updating the Eighteenth- Century Text. Eds. Debra Taylor Bourdeau and Elizabeth Kraft. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007. 123-40. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 1-21. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “The Roads of the Novel.” The Novel. Vol. 2. Forms and Themes. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 611-46. Hall-Stevenson, John. Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, Continued. To which is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Sterne. London: Bladon, 1769. Hanway, Mary Ann. A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland. With Occasional Remarks on Dr. Johnson’s Tour: By a Lady. London: Fielding and Walke, 1776. Huck, Christian. “Seeing other People? Travel, Writing and the Senses.” Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen. Proceedings. Eds. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt. Trier: WVT, 2009. 227-38. Hunt, Margaret. The Middling Sort. Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680- 1780. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1996. Keymer, Thomas. A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Manning, Susan. “Sensibility.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830. Eds. Thomas Keymer and John Dee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 80- 99. B IRGIT N EUMANN 176 Markley, Robert. “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne and the Theatrics of Virtue.” The New Eighteenth Century. Theory - Politics - English Literature. Eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York: Methuen, 1987. 210-30. Marshall, David. The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Mills, Sara. Discourse of Difference. An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1991. Monthly Review 39 (1768). Monthly Review 60 (1779). Moore, John. A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany: With Anecdotes Relating to Some Eminent Characters. 1779. London: 1786, vol. 2. Neumann, Birgit. Die Rhetorik der Nation in britischer Literatur und anderen Medien des 18. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 2009. ---. “Gender und Nation in britischen Reiseberichten des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 58 (2008): 401-18. Patey, Douglas Lane. Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Pfister, Manfred. Laurence Sterne. London: Northcote House, 2001. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Radford, Tanya. “Seeing Feeling and Frustrating Reading in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.” Word and Image in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Ed. Christina Ionescu. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 154- 73. Scholz, Susanne. “The Rites of Gentlemen: Englishness, Masculinity and the Grand Tour.” Anglistentag 2001. Proceedings. Eds. Dieter Katovsky et al. Trier: WVT, 2001. 329-40. Smollett, Tobias. Travels through France and Italy. 1766. Ed. Frank Felsenstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal. 1768. Eds. Melvyn New and W.G. Day. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. The Critical Review 42 (1776). The Critical Review 66 (1788). Turner, Katherine. British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800. Authorship, Gender, and National Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Wilson, Kathleen. “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities.” A New Imperial History. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1-26. Wilson, Penelope. “Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader.” Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Ed. Isabel Rivers. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1982. 69-96. Woolf, Virginia. “The Sentimental Journey.” The Common Reader: Second Series. London: Hogarth, 1932. 78-85. J ULIA S TRAUB Mobility and the Canon: Discussing Literary Value in Early American Writing Concepts of the canon and canon formation have been important points of discussion in literary studies for the last forty years or so. Like any controversial concept, the canon raises many questions; still, there seems to be a certain consensus as far as our basic understanding of the term is concerned. To propose a neutral and broad definition, we use the word ‘canon’ today when talking about a corpus of secular literary texts deemed valuable and fit for preservation by a certain social group. Often the term is also used in its plural form to underline the fact that there is a multiplicity of canons and not just one. Furthermore, concepts of the canon these days place less emphasis on its solidity, i.e. the canon is regarded as changeable and subject to cultural developments. The concept of the canon and the theories that aim to elucidate it these days are closely linked to the notion of cultural memory, used here in reference to the work of Aleida Assmann. The building processes that lead towards the formation of canons are today seen as deeply reflective of the ways in which human beings deal with texts and how these texts shape their identities. 1 Canons are seen as important elements of cultural knowledge that is passed on from one generation to the next and thereby inextricably involved in the formation of collective identities. 2 1 Aleida Assmann, “Kanonforschung als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft,” Macht - Kanon - Kultur: Theoretische, historische und soziale Aspekte ästhetischer Kanonbildungen, ed. Renate von Heydebrand (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 59. Underlying any canon are evaluative processes. Evaluation includes both verbal and non-verbal practices which confer value on a particular work, which make it stand out from others by virtue of its selection. A good review that praises the quality of a poem is a very overt and verbal form of evaluation; a publisher’s decision to publish a particular manuscript a less conspicuous, non-verbal, but still powerful form. Evaluation, implying processes of appreciation and selection, is coupled with preservation, i.e. the work is meant to outlast the course of time and be made available for a future circle of readers. These three processes - appreciation, selection and preservation - are functionalized within contexts of communal identity-building: in general, canons speak for more than one person and imply collective rather than individual taste or opinion. They also imply consensus rather than exceptionality, and consistency rather than ran- 2 Assmann, 48. J ULIA S TRAUB 178 domness. Traditional approaches to the canon have regarded it as reflective of a nation’s character, based on the assumption that a national canon contains a nation’s most valuable works of literature and passes them on from one generation to the next. More recent voices in the canon debate stress the multiplicity of canons and their formative rather than reflective function: canons are no longer seen as the privilege of a nation as a geo-political entity, but as the property of communities that can be defined differently in political, religious or ethnic terms. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued, all evaluative activities have the effect of “drawing the work into the orbit of attention of potential readers,” thereby creating its value. 3 She also underlined the randomness and changeability of allegedly intrinsic literary value: “the value of a literary work is continuously produced and re-produced by the very acts of implicit and explicit evaluation that are frequently invoked as ‘reflecting’ its value and therefore as being evidence of it.” 4 Given the ways in which the canon debate has been opened up over the last two decades, it may seem strange that relatively little work has been done on a canon discourse in the United States of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Smith analyzed the concept of literary value as devoid of intrinsic meaning. Instead she speaks of the “visibility” of a work of literature that can fluctuate in the course of time (10). Canonical value is referred to as “the product of the dynamics of a system” (15, emphasis in the original) and thus as utterly contingent, “an effect of multiple, continuously interacting variables” (30). 5 This seems even more peculiar as the eighteenth century was the time when similar debates began to flourish in Great Britain, a development that has been analyzed by various critics. 6 3 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 10. In Britain, among other European countries, calls for the definition and establishment of aesthetic norms were made throughout the eighteenth century, and they were also acted upon. The appreciation of ‘good’ and valuable writing was not only theorized but also resulted very pragmatically in the writing of literary histories and literary biographies, such as those by Thomas Warton and Samuel Johnson. William Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare is often 4 Herrnstein Smith 52. 5 Even within the field of early American studies, some periods have received more attention in this respect than others. The Puritan period, i.e. the seventeenth century, for example, has for a long time been synonymous with ‘Early American,’ at the expense of eighteenth-century writing; see Carla Mulford, “What Is the Early American Canon, and Who Said It Needed Expanding? ,” Resources for American Literary Study 19.2 (1993): 165-73, 170. 6 See for example Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991); Jonathan B. Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print- Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Mobility and the Canon 179 turned to as an early example of how rules of evaluation were defined to establish binding norms and hierarchies of value in editing processes. 7 So what are the factors that complicate the American situation in the eighteenth century? One challenge which we encounter when dealing with the canon in the eighteenth century, no matter if it is America or Europe we are looking at, is a certain anachronism: the term canon, as referring to a set of secular texts, was only established in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was first used in secular terms as early as 1768 by the classicist David Ruhnken in his Historia Graecorum Oratorum, but the term was not used actively until the late nineteenth century. These developments point towards a tendency to appreciate and commemorate works of particular merit. 8 The OED lists the first secular use of the word in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1885. 9 Interestingly, what used to count as a deficit has become a major asset and point of interest in the field of American studies. Several recent publications have stressed and explored the branch of transatlantic literary studies: critics such as Paul Giles, Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning have made important contributions towards a sharper systematic and analytical understanding of what ‘transatlantic’ means in the context of literary studies, thereby shedding light on concepts such as Englishness in early American culture (Tennenhouse), transatlantic publication practices (Bannet) or women’s writing (Macpherson). But the main complicating factor is the deep transatlantic quality of early American literature. The close links that connected Britain and its colonies, respectively the young United States, not only in political and economic respects, but also with regard to its cultural production and identity have for a long time been blamed as a principal weakness: they were considered the main reason for a perceived lack of cultural autonomy and originality in literature and other forms of art. 10 7 Gorak 47-8. This ongoing interest in the transatlantic dimension of American literature reflects a more general shift away from concepts such as ‘national literature’ or ‘canon,’ whereby not only literary history is revised, but also traditional boundaries between disciplines are being eroded. Robert Crawford once put it succinctly in Devolving English Literature: “America was, from its beginning, not just a New World opening 8 Gorak 51. 9 G.A. Kennedy, “The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Application to the Greek and Latin Classics,” Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, ed. Jan Gorak (New York: Garland, 2001), 107. 10 Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007); Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011); Heidi Macpherson, Transatlantic Women’s Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008). J ULIA S TRAUB 180 before the passengers from the Mayflower; it was a cultural anthology [...].” 11 I would like to use this quotation as a point of departure because it suggests an interesting interplay between movement and stasis, mobility and fixity that is also characteristic of the development of an early American discourse concerned with the value of writing as of national importance and relevance. Early American writing - I am concerned in particular with the time span from 1770 to 1820 - should for the purpose of this essay be viewed in terms of a tapestry in which many different threads run together, some of which are of different provenance but similar enough to be merged. My main focus will be on the medium of periodical writing, the literary magazine in particular, which was a prominent platform for the expression of critical thought. Looking at examples which illustrate the emergence of an aesthetic discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the young United States, I will show that there was a desire to make value permanent in the face of a literary production context that was, while increasingly rich, also experienced as accelerated and volatile. I thereby submit the notion of canonicity to a discussion which puts to the fore the dynamic between fixity and mobility as an important impetus for the creation of literary value. The period I am looking at provides a wonderful case study of how a longing for stability and permanence, i.e. the sturdy solidity that the term ‘canon’ may still suggest to some, is confronted with a volatility of publication practices that seem to have been at odds with, yet at the same time encouraged, processes of canon formation. * Many were the voices that denied US-Americans their own national literature, and such voices could be heard well into the nineteenth century. Most to the point was Sydney Smith’s devastating statement in the Edinburgh Review of December 1818, where he claimed that Americans did not have the privilege of a national literature at all: “Literature the Americans have none - no native literature we mean. It is all imported.” 12 In fact, in 1820, only some 30% of the books published in the US were by American writers. 13 11 Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 176. Certainly the establishment of a distinctly aesthetic American discourse or what we would call American literary criticism was slow and belated. Much of the period’s fictional or poetic writing appears uninspired and imitative. Samuel Miller, whose impressive - albeit unfinished - A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century from 1803 contains one of the first historical discussions of 12 Sydney Smith, “Travels in Canada and the United States, in 1816 and 1817, by Lieutenant Francis Hall,” Edinburgh Review 31.61 (1818): 132-50, 132. 13 J.P. Pritchard, Criticism in America: An Account of the Development of Critical Techniques from the Early Period of the Republic to the Middle Years of the Twentieth Century (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1956), 10. Mobility and the Canon 181 American literature of the early period (as part of a chapter entitled “Nations Lately Become Literary”), detected one major reason: In the United States, the rewards of literature are small and uncertain. The people cannot afford to remunerate eminent talents or great acquirements. Booksellers, the great patrons of learning in modern times, are too poor to foster and reward the efforts of genius. 14 The development of authorship as a socially viable practice in the young United States was belated, leaving early America without author celebrities that would add some lustre to the literary landscape of the time. 15 Furthermore, the history of the legal protection of texts and authors’ rights in colonial America and later on in the United States is a long and vexed one. In Britain, modern copyright legislation begins with the Statute of Anne in 1710. In the United States, the first federal copyright law was only introduced in 1790, which, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, “made literature property and had therefore made authorship as a profession a possibility for American writers.” 16 From July 1818, we have another telling example taken from the North American Review, which develops this theme of a painfully experienced sense of inadequacy and immaturity: However, progress was not rapid: only few authors legally claimed their work as associations with commercial trade still appeared suspicious. Encompassing and effective legislation on an international scale was implemented only towards the end of the nineteenth century. This relatively late enforcement of copyright law did not only concern legal discourse and practice, but also directly affected the emergence of an American national literature. The pragmatic ramifications of these slow developments meant that the early American literary marketplace strongly relied on transatlantic importations of texts and books which were cheaper and readily available. The cumbersome development of copyright legislation in America fostered the notorious reprint culture in newspapers and magazines and explains the heavy reliance on the import of cheaper books from abroad. We make but a contemptible figure in the eyes of the world, and set ourselves up as objects of pity to our posterity, when we affect to rank the poets of our own 14 Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), 406-07. 15 On the development of authorship in colonial and US-American writing, see William Charvat and Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds., The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 1992); Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990); Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997). 16 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature: 1590-1820, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 14. J ULIA S TRAUB 182 country with those mighty masters of song who have flourished in Greece, Italy and Britain. 17 What is interesting here is that the nation’s standing as a cultural force is related to its literary legacy and the latter’s significance for future generations. This temporal arch that connects a mode of retrospection with instances of future-oriented projection is typical of any canonical project. The short excerpt nicely illustrates awareness of the fact that in order to leave a heritage from the past, work on a national literature ought to be done in the present. Further up in the same text, we find a textbook definition of what in canon studies is known as reflection theory: 18 “National gratitude - national pride - every high and generous feeling that attaches us to the land of our birth, or that exalts our characters as individuals, ask of us that we should foster the infant literature of our country [...].” 19 Hence the following example is maybe the more interesting as it provides a more complex case. The excerpt was written by Charles Brockden Brown, an important editor and novelist, and is taken from the American Register of January 1807, a publication which ran from 1806 to 1810 and meant to compile and thereby keep record, like a calendar, of the intellectual, political and scholarly activities that had taken place in the preceding year: Canon understood in such a way implies political and cultural distinctiveness, but also uniqueness of individual and collective ‘mentality’ that finds expression in works of literature. This also means that there are essential qualities that members of a certain group share and that are reflective of the group’s ‘character.’ This is of course an idea that is far removed from the way the canon is looked at in present-day discussions, where it is seen as constructed rather than given, fluid rather than carved in stone. English literature, beyond that of any other nation, may be represented as that of the whole world. The curiosity of that nation is such, that no work of general importance can make its appearance in any part of the civilized world without being speedily translated into English, and even the literature of our native country becomes English, by the republication of all important and valuable productions in Great Britain. 20 This passage begins with a description of the global impact of Anglophone writing, of what nowadays would probably be called ‘literatures in English,’ 17 Anon., “Art IX, An Essay on American Poetry,” North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal (1815-1821), 7.20 (1818): 198. 18 Sarah M. Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 13. 19 Anon., “Art IX, An Essay on American Poetry,” 198. 20 Charles Brockden Brown, “Review of Literature: General Catalogue and View of British Publications, for the Year 1806,” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science (1806-1810), January 1 (1807): 151. Mobility and the Canon 183 English being regarded as the world’s prime vernacular language. For a work to receive attention beyond its country of origin, so it is argued, it needs to be translated into English. The publication and distribution path of US- American books via Great Britain, it is argued, acts as an important gateway which facilitates the availability and accessibility of American texts on a global level. A good example to illustrate this phenomenon and to show that the publication detour via Britain did indeed catapult obscure American writers into the wider world is the period’s best-known and commercially most successful novel: Charlotte Temple by Susannah Rowson, a novel written by an American author, published for the first time in London in 1791 to then become a massive bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. 21 We are so intimately united with Great Britain in language, manners, law, religion, and commerce, that, in a literary point of view, we may justly be regarded as members of the same society, as a portion of the same people [...] and the whole annual produce of the British press being regularly transported to our shores, and furnishing almost the whole employment of our readers, British literature may truly be considered, so far as books are the property of their readers as well as of their writers, as likewise American. However, what I would like to highlight comes at the very end of this short excerpt. The value of certain American texts is asserted, which reflects awareness of how important it is to guarantee survival and persistence of what is ‘good’ American writing amidst this global circulation or flux of texts. ‘Valuable’ American books become English due to their republication in Great Britain, and this is not necessarily seen as a bad thing. This is a bi-directional movement, as we learn further on in the text: 22 There are a couple of points to be made. First, the understanding of ‘literature’ that is put forward here suggests that it meant ‘books’ rather than literary ‘works.’ In the absence of a clear understanding of what constituted literature in aesthetic terms, it is used to refer to material objects. Hence the author refers to literature when he mentions the produce of the British press as what accounts for the “literary point of view,” and when he talks about books as “property.” This is a point that I will take up again later. Equally striking is the reciprocal mobility that is referred to here, the fact that books are moved in two directions - in other words, a kind of bifocal mobility that makes British literature American and vice versa. While one would find it hard to argue for an evenly balanced reciprocity of literary commerce during the antebellum period, this passage contains a definition of transatlanticity in a nutshell, anticipating a phrasing such as Paul Giles’s, who reads British-American literature as revolving around “the more dis- 21 Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987). Its publisher in the United States was Mathew Carey, to whom I will return below. 22 Brown, “Review of Literature,” 151 (emphasis in the original). J ULIA S TRAUB 184 comfiting figures of mirroring and twinning, where mutual identities are not so much independently asserted but sacrilegiously travestied.” 23 Quite unlike the more traditional understanding of the canon as reflecting ‘given’ national identities, this excerpt shows the complex and contingent network of various factors involved in the assertion and mobilization of valuable pieces of writing. Far from the monolithic immutability often ascribed to notions of the canon, we are here dealing with processes of canon formation that suggest multiplicity, variety, the interplay of purely aesthetic concerns with material parameters and, last but not least, contingency. Passages such as the one quoted above remind us of how accidental the survival of some texts might have been - one may want to think of the hazards of transportation by sea - and that there is not always much consistency or system behind the solid surface of the canon. * The most seminal studies in early American literary history, coming from different angles, have emphasized the importance of language and its distribution for the building of an American nation in the decades following the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. Michael Warner’s study from 1990 entitled The Letters of the Republic saw print discourse as a “cultural matrix” and “printedness” as a key element involved in the formation of the United States. 24 In contrast, Christopher Looby, in Voicing America (1996), argued that language did matter, but that the United States owed their coming into being to “acts of voice,” stressing the “saliency [...] of vocal utterance as a deeply politically invested phenomenon of the social world.” 25 The bigger frame for any such constructivist approach has of course been provided by philosophers and political scientists such as Benedict Anderson and Cornelius Castoriadis, who, in the shape of the ‘imagined community’ and ‘society as an imaginary institution,’ developed theories of the nation and society that stress the importance of a collective imagination. 26 23 Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001), 2. These communal acts of the imagination allow individuals to perceive themselves as citizens pertaining to a unified entity that far transcends their immediate realm of experience and manages to install a sense of community and simultaneity. For Anderson, both the novel and the newspaper, two emanations of what he 24 Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth- Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), xi. 25 Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 3. 26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Mobility and the Canon 185 terms “print-capitalism,” 27 act as such palpable agents involved in processes of creating cohesion that are extremely abstract. The role of newspapers and the novel is to set up a “specific imagined world of vernacular readers,” which is based on the idea of “steady, solid simultaneity through time.” 28 The relevance of Anderson’s work for a discussion of the early American Republic has been called into question. Trish Loughran, in her 2007 study on early American print culture entitled The Republic in Print, criticized Anderson’s work on the imagined community as far too optimistic, stressing the importance of regional developments and the progress of interregional connections that were much more of a reality than the large-scale notion of a nation which, at least in Anderson’s work, tends to ignore “geographical diversity” as a complicating factor. 29 For Loughran, the localness of early print culture enabled the founding of the United States, but it was only later, once regions started to interconnect, by tourism or the interregional exportation of print products, that Americans felt as members of a nation. 30 Central to early American print culture was periodical publishing, but given the overall difficulty of defining the implication of literature in processes of nation-building, a lot of work still needs to be done to reach a better understanding of the role that periodicals - i.e. newspapers, magazines, reviews, almanacs played in the formation of the nation and a national identity. Newspapers, which frequently contained poems and other literary forms of writing, existed in North America as of the early eighteenth century, often drawing upon the famous British models such as The Tatler and The Spectator; American magazines existed as of 1741, the year which saw the publication of the American Magazine and the General Magazine under Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin respectively. In the course of the century, magazine culture became quite a phenomenon: twenty-seven new magazines began publication from 1775 to 1795, a trend that persisted in the nineteenth century. 31 Magazines were often compared to repositories or museums: they not only contained original pieces of writing but also reprinted material that was taken from newspapers or other magazines, of European (predominantly British) and American provenance. In the Monthly Magazine (edited by As with the newspapers, the models that inspired The United States Magazine and The Royal American Magazine or later on The American Museum, The Columbian Magazine or the Massachusetts Magazine were British. 27 Anderson 43. 28 Anderson 63. 29 Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 13. 30 Loughran xix-xx. 31 William J. Free, The Columbian Magazine and American Literary Nationalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 12. J ULIA S TRAUB 186 Charles Brockden Brown) of April 1800, the following comparison was made, which resembles many other descriptions of magazines at that time: A Magazine ought literally to be a shop where stuffs of all conceivable or vendible kinds, where hemp from Russia, linen from Connaught, leather from Tunis, cotten [sic] from Hoquang, and silk from Aleppo, should be offered for sale, wrought into all textures, dyed of all colours, and cut into all shapes. 32 And in the Introduction to the United States Magazine, the editor, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, neatly sums up the function of a literary magazine as follows: “Magazines are greatly useful as repositories of a thousand valuable smaller pieces that otherwise would never see the light, but lie concealed amongst the papers of the ingenious.” 33 These and similar metaphors - the library, the store, the museum - imply that magazines were seen as storage space. Their self-proclaimed job was to take care of ‘fugitive’ material often previously published elsewhere, in foreign publications or American newspapers, and to mobilize this material at the same time by circulating it. The material that went into these magazines was extremely diverse and covered a variety of forms and genres. Faced with such a wealth of material, one should remain alert to the fact that much of these publications was ‘on loan’: material that was circulated, reprinted and appropriated at a time when copyright laws were relatively lax and when the pressures of the increasingly commercialized publishing industry began to take hold. 34 In this context, the following figure is impressive: three quarters of the material included in American magazines in the years 1741-1794 were drawn from other publications. 35 Furthermore, these magazines, even though they were often introduced to their readership as national institutions of the future, were short-lived. On average, they lasted for fourteen months, and owed their ephemeral character to the dispersion of their readership and distribution difficulties. 36 Periodicals were a cultural force because they enabled the circulation and mobilization of news, texts and, more generally speaking, information. Rich as the varieties of fictional and non-fictional writing that they contained may have been, they also made it hard and still make it hard for us to envision and define a cohesive corpus of American writing. Yet it is both entertaining 32 Anon., “A Literary Ware-House,” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799- 1800), 2.4 (1800): 253. 33 Hugh Henry Brackenridge, “Introduction,” United States Magazine; a Repository of History, Politics and Literature (1779-1779), 1 (1779): 9. 34 On the development of the American print market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 183-98. 35 Free 48. 36 Michael Gilmore, “Magazines, Criticism, and Essays,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 560. Mobility and the Canon 187 and instructive to look into editorials, prefaces and announcements exactly because they usually did insist on their own prosperous future. Thus, in the inaugural edition of the United States Magazine of January 1779, the new periodical is advertised as a publication that will “in itself contain a library, and be the literary coffee-house of public conversation” and that “will select from late and curious publications.” 37 The ambition of this new publication, it is obvious, is twofold: the magazine is meant to evaluate, to select and preserve works that are outstanding - what I would argue are the essential processes of canon formation - but it also aims to mark its own position within the public sphere, the realm of polite culture and public discourse. In addition to being important news channels, periodicals were instructive, often preoccupied with matters of taste and refinement, and thus important agents in the formation of an American civil society. Subsequently, the task of a good magazine was defined in the April 1790 edition of the New York Magazine as the following: “A well conducted Magazine, we conceive must, from its nature, contribute greatly to diffuse knowledge throughout a community, and to create in that community a taste for literature [...].” 38 It has been said that Magazines are oftentimes preventive of the acquirement of more solid literature, because that while they make the path to knowledge easy, it is more swiftly travelled over, and cannot be so accurately examined, as when the student is reduced to plod upon it through a tract of long and heavy reading of the authors, that are found in libraries. But suppose it may be true that we are likely to become more deep and solid scholars by reading systematic writers, and diving deeply to the fountain head of classic information, yet this is not to be obtained by every one, and is it not more eligible that the greater part be moderately instructed, than that a few should be unrivalled in the commonwealth of letters, and all the world besides, a groupe of ignorant and brainless persons? However, the ephemeral character of much writing included in these magazines was perceived as a problem - one could argue that the material they aimed to assemble was at times too mobile for their own good. This is from Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s introduction to the United States Magazine again: 39 Periodical publishing, characterized by its reliance on abbreviated forms of writing, this passage suggests, becomes the handmaid for an essentially utilitarian approach to learning: greater education for a greater number of people. This excerpt suggests that the information flow became increasingly dense and hard to manage. A very similar point was made by Joseph Dennie, an important journalist and editor of a literary magazine called The Port-Folio, in an early essay series called “The Farrago,” dating from 1792: he refers to 37 Brackenridge 9. 38 Anon., “Introductory Essay,” The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository (1790-1797) 1.4 (1790): 195. 39 Brackenridge 9. J ULIA S TRAUB 188 the essay as the most suitable form for middle-class readers who do not have the time to read lengthy books. 40 The American Register edition of January 1807, which I already looked at above, contains an overview or “sketch” of American writing from the years 1806-07 written by Charles Brockden Brown. Predictably enough, the superiority of European countries in terms of literary production is mentioned, while the US-American situation is seen as ambiguous: “A vast number of pens is constantly busy,” it is argued; however, “circumstances oblige them or incline them to be satisfied with brief essays, in daily newspapers and gazettes.” The improved digestibility of periodical writing coupled with its expanded geographical and demographic reach exerts a democratizing effect. Magazines and newspapers may well lead to a truncation of written thought; however, they also ensure large-scale reading, reaching a wider readership and thus leading to a quantitative improvement of reading as a practice important for the nation and its citizens. 41 [...] the American states are, in a literary view, no more than a province of the British empire. In these respects we bear an exact resemblance to Scotland and Ireland. [...] Books flow in upon us from the great manufactory of London, in the same manner as they make their way to Bristol, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin. As the inhabitants of these cities get their books from London, their cloths from Manchester, and their hardware from Birmingham, so do those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and the importation and consumption in all these articles is such in the American towns, as to place them by no means in a rank below that of the British provincial capitals, in refinement, luxury, and knowledge. There is no lack of originality, nor is there a shortage of writers in early nineteenth-century America. Rather the media at hand, short-lived periodicals, force writers to adapt their writing in terms of scope and ambition. As a consequence, 42 As regards the realm of literature, the author argues, America is just a province. One should note that in this excerpt ‘literature’ is again used in the sense of ‘books,’ books that are sent off to the peripheries of the British cultural empire, along with cloth, steel and iron. Literature is thus essentially a mobile commodity, involved in a vast transatlantic commercial endeavour. As Ian K. Steele has shown, the British empire produced networks of communication that did not only help to promote commerce, trade and administration, but it also allowed scholars, scientists and intellectuals to connect with each other or at least to disseminate their work. 43 40 Angela Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 42. Michael Warner has 41 Charles Brockden Brown, “A Sketch of American Literature for 1806-7,” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science (1806-1810), 1 (1807): 173. 42 Brown, “A Sketch of American Literature for 1806-7,” 173. 43 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986). Mobility and the Canon 189 examined the nationalist rhetoric that informed “any and all stages of bookmaking,” suggesting that the aesthetic dimension of books, and by implication the specifically American aesthetic qualities of a book, were left undefined, ‘American’ connoting the “value of nationality” rather than the features of polite literature. 44 ‘Literature’ meant something else to the eighteenth-century reader than it does today. 45 No wonder then that, as the following excerpt suggests, there was a growing desire to systematize and immobilize this circulation of goods. Here is another example from the Monthly Anthology of January 1808, which outlines the aims of the magazine: The aesthetic implications that inform an intuitive modern understanding of literature as in ‘belles lettres’ were still to be defined in the eighteenth century, resulting in a gradual refinement and narrowing of the term. Under this head we propose to commence a review of books in American literature, which have either been forgotten, or have not hitherto received the attention they deserve. Interested as we are in every thing, which relates to the honour of our country, we are not ashamed to express our conviction, that one reason of the low estimation, in which our literature is held among ourselves as well as in Europe is, that there has yet been no regular survey of this field of letters. 46 The author’s hope is that there are a few rare works that will “awaken at least the regard of some future historian of literature,” 47 This desire for sustainability at a time when writing was felt to be shortlived also fostered the development of another important canon-building tool, the literary anthology. A remarkable number of literary collections, miscellanies and anthologies, song books and verse collections were published in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. a statement which stresses a desire for the sustainability and durability of texts under the assumption that a connoisseur will, in the future, be able to reappraise the beauty and value of these texts. It seems paradoxical that this call for permanence should appear in such an ephemeral medium. 48 44 Warner 121. Miscellanies brought together entire pieces (mainly poems) but also snippets of texts 45 Trevor Ross, “The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” ELH 63.2 (1996): 397-422. 46 Anon., “Retrospective Notices of American Literature,” The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review Containing Sketches and Reports of Philosophy, Religion, History, Arts and Manners (1803-1811), 5.1 (1808): 54. 47 Anon., “Retrospective Notices of American Literature,” 54. 48 For a discussion of the anthology as a literary genre, see Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry Into Anthologies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001). See G. Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971) for an impressive listing of different kinds of miscellanies published in Britain between 1600 and 1800. J ULIA S TRAUB 190 that could be easily detached from their context without losing their appeal, and they had been extremely popular in London since the Restoration. They agreed with the booksellers’ need to market their products, but also pleased a new readership with little time and/ or little money keen to get their share of reading. 49 In America the first literary anthology was published around 1744/ 45, an anonymous work which is noteworthy for its inclusion of several poems by Mather Byles and was called Poems by Several Hands. 50 The next and more important anthologies appeared only towards the end of the century: Mathew Carey’s Beauties of Poetry, British and American (1791), the first American collection of ‘beauties,’ and The Columbian Muse (1794), and Elihu Hubbard Smith’s American Poems, Selected and Original (1793). 51 Mathew Carey’s The Beauties of Poetry, British and American contained 244 pages and brought together poems by both British and American poets. As Carey put it in the advertisement to his volume, he hoped to provide an “elegant fund of rational and innocent entertainment” and to thereby “enlarge the understanding, and refine the heart,” a rather common declaration of intention at this time, when the dulce et utile theme was often embedded in a discourse of politeness, taste and refinement. By including “copious extracts from the most celebrated American bards,” he aimed to make his work “more acceptable” to American readers. 52 49 Barbara M. Benedict, “The ‘Beauties’ of Literature, 1750-1820: Tasteful Prose and Fine Rhyme for Private Consumption,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope (New York: AMS), 316-46. Three years later, Carey published a second anthology, The Columbian Muse, and there decided to do entirely without British poems and to focus instead on the work of, as it says on the title page, “various authors of established reputation.” Carey (1760-1839) was an Irishman who worked as a printer (also for Benjamin Franklin, whom he met in Paris), published several magazines, among which was the Columbian Magazine mentioned above, wrote a number of books, some of them political economy, and worked as a bookseller. He was a man of many talents, but what is most intriguing about him is his persistent interest, throughout his career, in the selection, preservation and circulation of value. This makes him a particularly interesting literary figure of his time in that his biography and work create a conflux where the interest in value becomes explicitly prag- 50 Anon., A Collection of Poems: By Several Hands (Boston: Green and Gookin, 1744). 51 Mathew Carey, ed., Beauties of Poetry, British and American (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1791) and The Columbian Muse: A Selection of American Poetry, from Various Authors of Established Reputation (New York: M. Carey, 1794); Elihu Hubbard Smith, ed., American Poems: Selected and Original (Litchfield: Collier and Buel, 1793). A relatively brief overview of eighteenth-century American poetry anthologies is given by Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995), 5. 52 Carey, Beauties, n.p. Mobility and the Canon 191 matic, but is also made to serve a larger design of building a cultural memory for the nation. The other outstanding editor figure was Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771- 1798), who had grown up in Connecticut, went to Yale, studied medicine and moved to New York City, where he practised as a physician and joined the city’s famous Friendly Club, before he died of yellow fever. He wrote a variety of texts, among them not only poetry and essays, but also a libretto, insightful diaries and a utopia. His anthology from 1793, published in Litchfield, Connecticut, was meant to preserve texts that had previously appeared in magazines and was the first anthology of American poetry to be published. 65 poems were included by poets such as Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight and John Trumbull. Their overall style was “neo-classical and conservative, quite closely modelled after the British masters (primarily Pope).” 53 Still, this anthology can be seen as “a splendid landmark,” a document that offers insight into US-American civilization in the years around 1790. 54 When looking round them, they [the publisher] saw many Poems, written by the most eminent American Authors, from the loose manner of their publishment, known only to a few of their particular acquaintance, and unheard of by the generality of their Countrymen. The value of the performances, and the regard which authors generally feel for their literary offspring, left them no room to doubt, but that, at some future period, each person would think it not unworthy the while to collect what he had scattered. It is worth looking at the Preface that Smith wrote for American Poems, Selected and Original as it allows us to see how strongly concerned pivotal figures like him were with the building of a canon: 55 Performances of this kind, falling from the pens of persons not intent on literary fame; or intent on reputation; or whole names have not yet been dignified by national applause; especially as many of them are adapted to particular and local occasions; notwithstanding their desert, are constantly liable to be forgotten and lost. [...] Among other things, it did not appear to be a matter altogether destitute of usefulness, to bring together, in one view, the several poetical productions of the different States. 56 Smith mentions that the “loose manner” of periodical publishing is the reason for its inefficiency: periodicals simply fail to reach the kind of broad readership that they would ideally target. Inscribed into this passage is the fear of losing valuable material and the resulting desire to make a conscious effort at preserving what is thought of as precious. Later on in the same pref- 53 William K. Bottorff, “Introduction,” American Poems by Elihu Hubbard Smith, ed. William K. Bottorff (Gainesville: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), viii. 54 Bottorff xviii. 55 Elihu Hubbard Smith, “Preface,” American Poems iii. 56 “Preface,” American Poems iv. J ULIA S TRAUB 192 ace, Smith repeats this anxiety towards mobile, fugitive media when he mentions “the frail security of an obscure newspaper,” which for a long time “was the only one they had for some of the handsomest specimens of American Poetry.” 57 His anthologizing project aims to create endurance, to establish a stable storage medium that will outlast the vicissitudes of time and fixate valuable pieces of writing for the future, “[t]o afford a stronger, and more durable security, is one of the objects of this Publication.” 58 A closer look at book history in colonial America and the young United States alerts us to the randomness and contingency to which we owe the survival of certain texts - to the exclusion of others. Contingency, if we are to follow Stephen Greenblatt’s recent work, lies at the heart of cultural mobility because it challenges grand narratives (of the nation, of collective identity, of civilization) by defying their teleological implications. His concern is with ‘value’: what Smith is saying is that the writing of good literature deserves shared appreciation and this appreciation is reflected in any kind of endeavour aimed at preserving literary texts otherwise likely to get lost. Outward manifestations of appreciation are important for the formation of a national identity. His anticipation of the reaction of future generations and their reception of these works confirms the underlying tenor of nascent literary self-reflection in terms of national feeling. 59 57 Ibid. While providing a historical view of the development of American literary history and its institutions of evaluation, the principal aim of this essay was to suggest that the interest in mobility that is reflected in current literary debates ought to target also those aspects of the discipline of literary studies that represent quite the opposite - stability, consensus, permanence - and to thereby begin to appreciate a ‘contingent’ approach to literary history or the canon as a source for fresh perspectives. 58 Ibid. 59 Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 16. Mobility and the Canon 193 Works Cited Anon. A Collection of Poems By Several Hands. Boston: Green and Gookin, 1744. Anon. “Introductory Essay.” The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository (1790-1797) 1.4 (1790): 195. Anon. “A Literary Ware-House.” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799- 1800) 2.4 (1800): 253. Anon. “Retrospective Notices of American Literature.” The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review Containing Sketches and Reports Philosophy, Religion, History, Arts and Manners (1803-1811) 5.1 (1808): 54. Anon. “Art IX, An Essay on American Poetry.” North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal (1815-1821) 7.20 (1818): 198. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Assmann, Aleida. “Kanonforschung als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft.” Macht - Kanon - Kultur: Theoretische, historische und soziale Aspekte ästhetischer Kanonbildungen. Ed. Renate von Heydebrand. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998. 47-59. Bannet, Eve T. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Benedict, Barbara M. “The ‘Beauties’ of Literature, 1750-1820: Tasteful Prose and Fine Rhyme for Private Consumption.” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. Ed. Kevin L. Cope. New York: AMS P, 2004. 316-46. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Cambridge History of American Literature: 1590-1820. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Bottorff, William K. “Introduction.” American Poems by Elihu Hubbard Smith. Ed. William K. Bottorff. Gainesville: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966. v-xviii. Brackenridge, Hugh H. “Introduction.” United States Magazine; a Repository of History, Politics and Literature (1779-1779) 1 (1779): 9. Brown, Charles B. “Review of Literature: General Catalogue and View of British Publications, for the Year 1806.” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science (1806-1810) January 1 (1807): 151. ---, “A Sketch of American Literature for 1806-7.” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science (1806-1810) 1 (1807): 173. Carey, Mathew, ed. Beauties of Poetry, British and American. Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1791. ---, ed. The Columbian Muse: A Selection of American Poetry, from Various Authors of Established Reputation. New York: J. Carey, 1794. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998. Charvat, William, and Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Corse, Sarah M. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2 2000. Dana, Richard H. “Sketch Book I.II Book Review.” North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal 9 (1819): 322-56. J ULIA S TRAUB 194 Dauber, Kenneth. The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Ferry, Anne. Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Free, William J. The Columbian Magazine and American Literary Nationalism. The Hague: Mouton, 1968. Giles, Paul. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. Gilmore, Michael. “Magazines, Criticism, and Essays.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 1: 1590-1820. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 558-72. Golding, Alan C. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea. London: Athlone, 1991. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Kennedy, G.A. “The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Application to the Greek and Latin Classics.” Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate. Ed. Jan Gorak. New York: Garland, 2001. 105-16. Kramnick, Jonathan B. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Macpherson, Heidi. Transatlantic Women’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Miller, Samuel. A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century. 1803. Vol. 2. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001. Mulford, Carla. “What Is the Early American Canon, and Who Said It Needed Expanding? ” Resources for American Literary Study 19.2 (1993): 165-73. Looby, Christopher. Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Pritchard, J.P. Criticism in America: An Account of the Development of Critical Techniques from the Early Period of the Republic to the Middle Years of the Twentieth Century. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1956. Raven, James. “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century.” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Eds. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 183-98. Rice, Grantland S. The Transformation of Authorship in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Ross, Trevor. “‘The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century.” ELH 63.2 (1996): 397-422. Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Smith, Barbara H. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Smith, Elihu H., ed. American Poems: Selected and Original. Litchfield: Collier and Buel, 1793. Mobility and the Canon 195 ---. Preface. American Poems: Selected and Original. Litchfield: Collier and Buel, 1793. liiv. Smith, Sydney. “Travels in Canada and the United States, in 1816 and 1817, by Lieutenant Francis Hall.” Edinburgh Review 31.61 (1818): 132-50. Steele, Ian K. The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Tennenhouse, Leonard. The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Vietto, Angela. Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. O LIVER S CHEIDING Migrant Fictions: The Early Story in North American Magazines 1. Global Designs and Periodical Literature Literary globalization is not a phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Processes of textual travel and transformation characterize the prenation state period of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century transatlantic world, which has created dynamic interplays and negotiations between local cultures and multilingual, metropolitan literatures, or what has been called the “literary commons” of the Atlantic World. 1 Recent studies on world literature, however, are often reductive in the way in which they want to move beyond national paradigms in literary history. Numerous critics focus on investigations of the novel as a key genre and narrow down the longue durée of textual mobility to one specific form. In doing so, they frequently overlook the broader systematic relations between literary cultures in the past. 2 One of the most prominent approaches in analyzing the diffusion of the novel results from Franco Moretti’s studies in which he traces the wave patterns and formal variations of the novel over long distances of time and space. Given the vast field of global textual traffic, Moretti challenges ‘conventional’ literary histories which rely on periodization, genre, and canonicity. 3 1 Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810: Migrant Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 9. From the point of view of world systems theory and its assumption of a reciprocal literary exchange between center and periphery, he argues that the novel emerges as a “compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials” (58). Moretti’s macro-structural analysis tends to downsize, however, the “local materials” or what is meant by the “structural compromise” that the “encounter between western forms and local reality dictates” (62). His own “cognitive metaphors,” or what he calls “trees” and “waves” (66) to visualize the multipath routes of the novel, 2 In his “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History 39 (2008), David Damrosh criticizes the “presentism” (490) of existing studies that fail in explaining “the cocreation of literary systems that have almost always been mixed in character, at once localized and translocal” (490). 3 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68; cf. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 11-22. O LIVER S CHEIDING 198 make him rely on older developmental schemes predicting that “after 1750 the novel arises just about everywhere” (64). 4 In contrast, recent transatlantic scholarship as well as studies on authorship and print culture have demonstrated that the alleged metropolitan textual hegemonies and national trajectories are frequently out of sync with the actual local literatures in the past. 5 Current studies on the early national period assert, for instance, that the American novel rises out of the decline of a prevailing “periodical culture” in the 1820s and is synchronous to changes brought about by newly emerging “authorial economies” and their “multiple livelihood strategies” in Antebellum America. 6 In the context of current definitional debates and the global reexaminations of literary production, the business of letters, and reading audiences, this paper shifts attention from the novel to the early short story in North America prior to 1800 and discusses the vibrant literary landscape of late eighteenth-century magazine fiction. 7 4 For a critical survey of the progressive school in literary history and the “history of common forms” see James Raven, “New Reading Histories, Print Culture and the Identification of Change: The Case of Eighteenth-Century England,” Social History 23.3 (1998): 268-287. 5 Cf. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, eds., Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 1-9; Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of US Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 114-116. 6 Cf. Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of the Early American Magazine Culture (Urbana et al.: U of Illinois P, 2012), 1-29, 38; Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 1-52, 17. 7 Moretti’s essay sparked off a debate caused by its normative assessment of literary history. Critics not only disputed Moretti’s narrow focus on the novel, but also questioned what Jonathan Arac (“Anglo-Globalism? ” New Left Review 16 (2002): 35-45) has called “formalism without close reading” (38), rejecting Moretti’s proposal of “distant readings without a single direct textual reading” (37; original emphasis). From an empirical point of view, this is one of Moretti’s weak spots. Much of his distant reading derives from ‘second-hand’ sources such as national bibliographies, leaving out the considerable amount of prose fiction in eighteenth-century periodicals, which do not appear in bibliographical sources but play a central role for the literary production and consumption as well as its shifting audiences. As recent scholarship on reading audiences has shown, the appetite for periodical tales, historiettes, fragments, essays and chapbooks exceeds the novelistic production, so that the eighteenth-century novelreading public is not the rule but the exception, and is only one among many other reading ‘publics’; cf. Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006); others argue that the novel only establishes a kind of niche consumption in the eighteenth century and that eighteenth-century literature has to be seen as a “range of products created by a loose body of actors (authors, publishers, printers, readers, distributors, commentators, etc.) who are themselves at various points active, to various degrees, in sundry public spheres that intersect often temporarily, and that function sometimes in agreement, sometimes in contention, and sometimes simply coincidentally”: Christopher Flint, The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 50; for revisions of his earlier “conjectures” see Moretti’s reply to his critics in “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (2003): 73-81. Migrant Fictions 199 In the following, I will focus on processes of textual travel and transformation that characterize the early American story. In doing so, the paper seeks to demonstrate how some of the so-called first ‘American’ short stories (such as “The Child of Snow,” 1792) emerge from complex cultural translations and traffic. One of my essay’s goals is to reframe the national paradigm of American literary history by taking into consideration the multilingual sources of the early American story, which are now for the first time widely accessible through numerous electronic databases. 8 This paper also intends to go beyond the search for structural and generic elements, which characterize the ‘emergence’ of the American short story, to ask questions about how early stories that migrated from Europe to America have been re-classified by editors for changing audiences, times, and circumstances. I will argue that the early American story is less a creation of a single author than an editorial product. Its success, or its ‘becoming American,’ depends less on its being ‘original,’ that is, penned by an American writer (most stories were published anonymously, anyway) than by its brevity and variety, those features most essential to the medium that the story was published in: the magazine, meant to be a type of eighteenth-century periodical exclusive of newspapers not primarily concerned with conveying intelligence, whose miscellaneous sections on art, poetry, literature, and science are frequently compared by editors to a “Bee Hive, enriched by the aromaticks of every field.” 9 Besides, early American stories often have multiple ‘lives’ as they cross generic and linguistic boundaries, for instance, from collections of foreign language tales that are translated into English to separately printed extracts in newspapers or magazines. Some have an ‘after-life’ as reprints or serve as templates for nineteenth-century short stories. Along the way, they were renamed, stripped of their origin, and sometimes re-written. Whereas, in Romanticism, European legends are consciously modified, as in Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), the early story in America emerges from acts of literary piracy and verbatim copying as well as from the editors’ relentless hunt for short tales that satisfy the desultory reading habits of their audience. More recent studies demonstrate that “[r]eaders and publishers […] routinely forced fiction to migrate into other forms of writing - a kind of transtextual operation that turned fiction into other genres such as aphorism, moral essay, magazine article, character sketch, political 8 The growing interest in periodical literature is documented in Mark Kamrath and Sharon M. Harrison, eds., Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2005), ix-xxvii. Periodical literature is widely made accessible by databases such as ProQuest’s American Periodical Series Online and the American Antiquarian Society’s Historical Periodicals Collection. 9 “General Preface,” The Massachusetts Magazine, or, Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment (January 1, 1790): ii. O LIVER S CHEIDING 200 disquisition, and so on.” 10 Moreover, the magazine’s material constraints resulting from a loose production cycle (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, annual), length of availability, a changing readerly consumption, and even the paucity of paper and lack of money determine editorial decisions. 11 Thus, the magazine’s publication design is sometimes less motivated by deliberate acts or even literary intentions on the side of the editor or the magazine’s proprietor than by the fact that a brief piece of prose is at hand to fill the limited space available in the miscellaneous section. One could come to the conclusion that quite often the materiality of the page (i.e. paper size, double or multiple column print, page breaks, etc.), or what one editor has called the magazine’s “crowded page,” 12 Since the burgeoning field of periodical literature opens up exciting opportunities for fresh examinations and comparative analysis of the early story in America, we are confronted with fundamental questions: How can we analyze the art of story-telling prior to 1800 while avoiding normative reassessments that disqualify early stories as the less aesthetic predecessor of the nineteenth-century American short story? How can we restore the massive body of early stories and their narrative dynamics to American literature? In addition, the recent interest in ‘itinerant poetics’ stresses the materialist dimension of literary traffic that goes beyond the mere generic features of a given text. Margaret Cohen puts it this way: determines the emergence and continuity of the short story more effectively than what literary histories account for as its ‘original’ sources, for instance, oral story-telling that survived in the British colonies. The materialist approach to genre is a good starting point for distinguishing the multiple levels at which a genre must be working for it to travel. Genres that travel across space, like genres that endure across time, must be able to address social and/ or literary questions that are transportable, that can speak to divergent publics or a public defined in its diversity, dispersion, and heterogeneity. 13 10 Flint 46. 11 Still one of most informative studies on early American magazines is Lyon Richardson, A History of Early American Magazines, 1741-1789 (New York: Octagoon Books, 1966); for more recent updates on single early periodical ventures see Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton, eds., The Conservative Press in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1999), Keith Pacholl, “Newspapers and Journals,” Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, vol. 3, ed. James Ciment (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2006), 619-622, and Gardner. 12 Joseph Dennie, An Established Literary and Political Paper. The Editor of the Farmer’s Weekly Museum, Printed at Walpole, Newhampshire, Offers his Paper to the Publick, as a Vehicle Free From Localities and Multiplied Advertisements, and Calculated for General Circulation (Walpole, NH: Printed by David Carlisle, 1797), n.p. 13 Margaret Cohen, “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 482. Migrant Fictions 201 Extending the materialist lineage in literary studies, Trish Loughran speaks of an “unnarrated gap” that exists, as it does in our case, between the “world of things” (magazines) and the “world of words” (early short narratives). 14 In other words, we do not know what kind of literature we are talking about (in most cases short prose fiction in serial publications) when we talk about eighteenth-century periodical literature. 15 Likewise, in his early study on the English novel in magazines, Robert Mayo disputes literary history’s tunnel vision and its single focus on the novel by reconstructing the “considerable repository of prose fiction” in British magazines, “which seldom figured in the publishers’ lists and which is rarely mentioned in the reviews, but which nevertheless enjoyed a wide currency in eighteenth-century England, and was both ‘pre-romantic’ and ‘popular.’” 16 So far, there is no in-depth study available that discusses the earliest period of short fiction in America, which James Nagel calls “the most intriguing for literary history in that it is here, in the years from 1747 to 1819, that the essential elements of a ‘story’ are established.” 17 Some attempts have been made to include the early story into a genealogical framework of the American short story, which has its ‘origins’ in the particular colonial forms of story-telling such as providence tales, captivity narratives, sketches, anecdotes, or other brief prose narratives “structured around a central character with a conflict.” 18 In a recent article, “‘The Adventures of Emmera,’ the Transatlantic Novel, and the Fiction of America” (2007), Jeffrey Richards challenges the nationalist model prevalent in studies on the early American novel, and warns against a “critical ‘navel gazing’ that ignores the more vibrant, complex, transnational dimension to the circulation of fiction in English.” As insightful as these approaches are, they focus on internal processes of generic creation, but lack a sufficient awareness of the international dimension in those processes of formation and transformation, particularly in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and its migrant fictions. 19 14 Loughran 17. By examining early novels that were published prior to the allegedly first American novel - William Hill Brown’s A Power of Sympathy (1789) - Richards concludes: 15 The only detailed study available on one particular periodical genre, the serial essay, remains Martin Christadler’s Der amerikanische Essay (Heidelberg: Winter, 1968). Since this study has not been translated into English, most of Christadler’s astute and trenchant observations have gone unnoticed; cf. Gardner. 16 Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815: With a Catalogue of 1375 Magazine Novels and Novelettes (London: Oxford UP, 1962), 1. 17 James Nagel, Anthology of the American Short Story (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 5. 18 Nagel 4. 19 Jeffrey Richards, “‘The Adventures of Emmera,’ the Transatlantic Novel, and the Fiction of America,” Early American Literature 42 (2007): 496. O LIVER S CHEIDING 202 Because there is virtually no such thing as an American novel (considered nationally) written before 1800 - that is, one written by an American-born author, about an exclusively American subject, with exclusively American characters, for a presumed-to-be exclusive American audience - and because the phrase “English” or “British” novel obscures the presence of this fancied America, then perhaps a term like the fiction of America, with its necessarily transatlantic character, might be substituted for an authorially centered designation. 20 If knowledge of the author does not determine a text’s national identity, as Richards maintains, and if the “denationalized scheme” can be applied to reassess the early American novel in terms of what he calls “fictions of America,” a similar claim can be made for a re-appraisal of the short story in early American magazines. This also raises the question of what determines a text’s national identity, particularly in light of the fact that short stories were anonymously published and not exclusively written by American authors. However, short narratives are so far not examined in conjunction with the literary production, consumption, and exchange that characterize the transatlantic world of the eighteenth century. While the novel has been heavily ‘transnationalized,’ 21 the short story seems to have remained the gate-keeper of nationality since it is the genre “often referred to as our nation’s unique contribution to modern literary forms,” as Eugene Current-García aptly puts it. 22 So far, only Edward Pitcher’s carefully researched anthologies and bibliographical studies provide reliable source information about the early story’s emergence in America. Pitcher, who edits the reference series “Studies in British and American Magazines” (2000-2007), has established a canon of stories written by American authors by closely examining and indexing eighteenth-century British and European magazines in order to assure the Americanness of the stories he has collected. However, his approach is strictly generic and aims at classifying forms. It is less interested in the circulation of fiction in English, in how stories migrated and, in doing so, how they became ‘American.’ 23 In addition, the few comprehensive anthologies available, like the one edited by Keith J. Fennimore, work on the assumption of literary continuity and the existence of a tradition in American literature. Despite the “vicissitudes of 20 Richards 501, emphasis in the original. 21 Cf. Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011); Wai Chee Dimock, ed., Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007). 22 Eugene Current-García, The American Short Story Prior to 1850 (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 1. 23 See Pitcher’s comprehensive bibliography Fiction in American Magazines Before 1800 (Schenectady, NY: Union College P, 1993) and his two anthologies Sensationalist Literature and Popular Culture in the Early American Republic (Lewiston: Mellen, 2000); An Anthology of the Short Story in 18 th and 19 th Century America, 2 vols. (Lewiston: Mellen, 2000). Migrant Fictions 203 the popular press, the pressures of politics, business and the arid literary climate,” quite a number of tales, according to Fennimore, “constitute a real presence” as they made it into the households of late eighteenth-century New England by employing American scenes and themes, and thus provide a “vital link to our American past.” 24 Contrary to assimilating the short story to national literary narratives, my reading suggests that the early migrant stories participate in forging an imaginative America in which origin and continuity are contingent and inessential. One may contend that what makes the early short story ‘American’ is its “mode of imagining an already imagined place,” or its proliferation and articulation as a reprinted text. 25 2. Migrant Stories and Early American Magazines A good case in point is the anonymously published short story “The Child of Snow” and its circulation in American newspapers and magazines from July 4, 1787, in the Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser to its final appearance in The Boston Weekly Magazine and Ladies’ Miscellany of 1818. The story tells of a traveling merchant’s wife who becomes pregnant by another man during one of her husband’s long absences and, on his return, attributes her son’s birth to a miraculous conception induced by a falling snowflake, inadvertently swallowed while she was leaning outside her window. The story, however, has a macabre ending. Initially the husband appears to believe the wife’s story, but secretly he plots revenge for her infidelity. When the boy is fifteen, the merchant takes him on a journey to Genoa, where he sells him to a Saracen slave trader bound for Alexandria. Upon his return, he tells his wife that the boy melted away on an especially hot day in the torrid climate. “The wife knew perfectly well the merchant’s meaning,” the narrator concludes, only to add: “She durst not, however, break out, but was obliged to swallow the liquor she had brewed.” 26 Critics identify this rather flat and short piece of prose as an American story. 27 24 Keith J. Fennimore, Short Stories from Another Day: Eighteenth-Century Periodical Fiction (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1989), 8. They recognize in it a successful combination of folkloristic material with a domestic background, namely, the American merchant traveling for 25 Richards 522. 26 “The Child of Snow,” The Massachusetts Magazine, or, Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment, Dec. 1 (1792): 719; hereafter CS. 27 Abby H.P. Werlock, ed., The Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story (New York: Facts on File, 2010), x; Current-García 13; for the story’s problematic origin see Robert D. Arner, “‘The Child of Snow’: A Misidentified ‘Early American’ Short Story,” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 98-100; Edward W. Pitcher, “A Note on the Source of the ‘The Child of Snow’ and ‘The Son of Snow,’” Early American Literature 13 (1978): 217- 218. O LIVER S CHEIDING 204 his business. It also matches the literary tradition of instructive and moral tales about sexual misconduct and marital infidelity, and thus fulfills an eighteenth-century narrative purpose: the fusion of realism and didacticism. In The American Short Story before 1850, Eugene Current-García highlights, in addition to the story’s themes, the particular narrative elements which make this tale a forerunner of the nineteenth-century short story. Its combined use of “irony, novel detail, both realistic and fantastic, and its matterof-fact tone” make it an authentic American tale. 28 “The Child of Snow” offers hidden humor too. Its author has slipped into a mildly racy story of what was originally a quite blunt Indian creation myth. Several of these legends describe the birth of our world in tales similar to that of the erring wife’s. Usually some Indian maiden becomes impregnated by a drop of snow or rain falling on her belly or between her legs while she lies sleeping on her back. Whether the anonymous author of “Child of Snow” was using the creation myth here to covertly satirize all such legends, seems dubious but not impossible. What is not dubious about the work is its significance as an early short story and as an early example of that terribly modern achievement, black humor. Jack B. Moore, in an earlier article on “Black Humor in an Early American Short Story” (1966), reads the story as a mixed type of oral Native American themes and European narrative traditions. He concludes: 29 On its first appearance, in the Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser in 1787, the story’s title was “The Child melted by the Sun.” A month later, it appeared in Boston and then circulated in numerous newspapers published in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island until 1790, only to reappear twice in 1800. 30 28 Current-García 13. Most newspaper reprints followed the Charleston Morning Post and acknowledged the source. The story was borrowed “From Mr. Le Grand’s Tales of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Pierre-Jean Baptiste Legrand d’Aussy’s collection of thirteenth-century French tales appeared under the title Fabliaux ou Contes des douzième et treizième siècles, traduits ou extraits d’après les manuscrits in Paris in 1779. A first English translation was published in London in 1786, titled Tales of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. From the French of Mr. Le Grand. John Williams, the translator, re-issued the collection as Norman Tales in 1789. The French medieval tale “De l’enfant qui fu remis au soleil” mutated into the English story “The Child Melted by the Sun,” and the American newspaper reprints ascribe their borrowings to the English translations. 29 Jack B. Moore, “Black Humor in an Early American Short Story,” Early American Literature 1 (1966): 8. 30 The story appeared in twelve newspapers in 1787 (South Carolina, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York); there are three entries for 1790 (Rhode Island, New York, South Carolina) and two for 1800 (Massachusetts, Vermont); see America’s Historical Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1690-1900. Migrant Fictions 205 The French medieval story has its own migratory history. The subject matter of the story and the first Latin version can be found in an eleventhcentury Cambridge collection of songs, the Carmina Cantabrigensia. 31 The story of a merchant’s unfaithful wife emerged out of South German folktraditions. 32 In North America, it had a second migratory career. “The Child Melted by the Sun” was already a well-circulated story and had reached some appeal in the columns of the dailies, when Isaiah Thomas, the foremost Boston newspaper and book publisher, reprinted the story in The Massachusetts Magazine in 1792. Thomas’ reprint omitted the source reference, and he changed the title to “The Child of Snow.” A comparative reading of the various stories and their textual changes shows that Thomas did not retrieve it from his newspaper files, but borrowed the story from Williams’ Norman Tales. As a book publisher, he had probably seen the collection’s advertisement made by American booksellers in 1791. Moreover, The Massachusetts Magazine that commenced in 1789 was on the verge of becoming the most attractive and popular periodical in Boston, “swallowing up all others,” as Jeremy Belknap wrote. It belonged to the de mercatore type, frequently a comic story of a cuckolded husband and his lustful wife. It was reused during the Middle Ages by Scandinavian, Italian, and French writers. The numerous rewritings made the original story shift from a ridiculum (piece of humor) to a moral story emplotted around the wife’s lie and merchant’s journey, or what has been called a German Märe, which originally meant gossip or news. It became widely known in other European collections as a fabliau or a comic tale, entitled “The Miracle of the Snow Child.” 33 Thomas, who had already published The Massachusetts Spy (1770- 1820) and earlier The Royal American Magazine (1774-1775), eked out a particular niche for his periodical by satisfying the popular demand for sentimental stories, making the magazine “a shrine for literary ladies of Massachusetts.” 34 Given the growing anti-French climate in the 1790s, one may speculate that Thomas omitted all references to the original source to avoid the promotion of French culture. In addition, such omissions could produce the illusion of originality and the impression that most of the magazine’s anonymous 31 One of the songs, the so-called Modus Liebinc, tells the snow-child sequence; cf. Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and his World (Rome: Edizioni di Storie e Letteratura, 1984), 150-158. 32 Cf. Max Manitius, Geschichte der Lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, vol. 3, Vom Ausbruch des Kirchenstreites bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts (München: Beck, [1931] 2005), 1036-37. 33 In Richardson 355. The magazine lasted eight years (1789-1796) and Thomas co-edited it until 1793. 34 Herbert R. Brown, “Elements of Sensibility in The Massachusetts Magazine,” American Literature 1 (1929): 286; for Thomas’ role as editor see Clifford Shipton, Isaiah Thomas: Printer, Patriot and Philanthropist, 1749-1831 (New York: Rochester, 1948), 45-67. O LIVER S CHEIDING 206 pieces were composed by Americans. However, such considerations are not only speculative but also fruitless. As often as these variables are articulated by critics, notions of a single literary community shine through as if it were already ‘national’ in character; but frequently it is not. Perhaps Thomas simply saw this writing of fewer than one thousand words as a suitable piece of prose whose brevity satisfied the audience’s reading habits in skimming and browsing texts. So how could a French story be re-classified as an early American short story? Two young German scholars, Aynur Erdogan and Philippe Fidler, have recently discussed the Americanness of the French Indian tale “L’Abenaki” (1765) which was translated into English and reprinted in an American magazine in 1774 as “Adventures of a Young English Officer Among the Abenakee Savages.” 35 based on the genesis of the story but on the social and political circumstances of its American publication. Where earlier readers identified with the English officer in the story, American readers, especially those on the road to open warfare with England in 1775, were more likely to identify with the Native American. Similar to “The Child of Snow,” both authors consider the Indian tale as a ‘transnational’ story since it appeared in France, Germany, and England before it migrated to America. Both scholars argue that its Americanness is not 36 Such a contextualist theory of the American short story’s emergence is viable, as Jan Fergus has shown in her Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (2006). Editors could exploit or create a community of readers precisely because they were not restricted in gender, socio-economic class, or politics as their subscriptions to specialized magazine titles might imply. Although the “Adventures of a British Officer” were published in the Royal American Magazine in 1775, the seemingly loyalist outlook did not prevent the editor (Isaiah Thomas) from printing radical patriotic pieces. In the politically heated climate of the 1770s, the magazines did not want to discover readers but rather produce them. Michel de Certeau speaks in this respect of a readerly “appropriation” of texts, an activity through which readers construct a text’s meaning for themselves, refashioning what they consume: [R]eaders are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they do not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the 35 The story made its first appearance in the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, cf. Aynur Erdogan, Philipp Fidler, “Critical Commentary,” Origins of the American Short Story, eds. Wolfgang Hochbruck, Aynur Erdogan and Philipp Fidler (Los Gatos: Slack Water P, 2008), 13-27. 36 Erdogan and Fidler 14. Migrant Fictions 207 establishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of reproduction. 37 Like editors, readers obviously plunder actively from texts and, in doing so, appropriate a story as ‘American’ independent from any reference to origin. In this sense, one may argue that “The Child of Snow” documents another pattern of re-classification based on the pluralities of texts, overlapping genres, and criss-crossed motifs assembled in magazines. “The Child of Snow” transports literary elements and sentiments that matched the overall design of Thomas’ magazine. The Massachusetts Magazine created an audience by its appeal to a popular rather than a cultivated taste. Compared to the many other short-lived periodicals of the early national period, The Massachusetts Magazine was a fairly vibrant and successful venture. Thomas avoided elite erudition and offered short “amusing but instructive” pieces for a readership that, “not having many leisure moments, will be more likely to read a short essay on any subject, than to set down and peruse in course a lengthy dissertation.” 38 He succeeded in building the magazine around a network of correspondents and collaborators. It was not only a selfproclaimed “asylum for native Genius,” 39 but it also established a discursive community based on notions of friendship and mutuality. The magazine created the impression that readers and writers alike (the ‘friends’ as they were called) have an equal share in patching together a general miscellany for an enlightened public. Magazines thus foster interlocking bonds of lettered sociability ranging from the intimacy of private life and the family to the public. They spell out a communitarian space for private and collective readings, build a collaborative authorship via a network of corresponding agents, and organize representational solidarity. 40 In opposition to the political press, Thomas and his co-editors founded an early form of a popular literary-cultural journal in the 1790s. This particular type of magazine functioned, as Gardner has it, as “a hybrid of modern print culture and older and ongoing cultures of correspondence, conversation, and manuscript exchange, [and as such] the magazine sought to use print not to eradicate the spaces between the voices, but to make them productive, communicative.” 41 37 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley et al.: U of California P, 1988), 174. Such readings of the magazine’s cultural role as a democratic commons framing a new citizenship overlap with what is called the “editorial function.” In the context of a reprint culture and its lack of originality, the 38 “The General Observer No. 1,” The Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment (January 1, 1789): 9. 39 “General Preface”: i. 40 Cf. Robb K. Haberman, “Magazines, Presentation Networks, and the Cultivation of Authorship in Post-Revolutionary America,” American Periodicals 18.2 (2008): 141-162. 41 Gardner 110. O LIVER S CHEIDING 208 term refers to the editor as a controller who arranges “the growing chaos of print voices and the expanding network of information.” Given his managerial agency, he “distill[s] from it the essence of what was truly useful and entertaining.” 42 Reassessing the editor as a new icon of literary production in the early republic is certainly timely and overdue; however, binding it to the editor’s mastermind misses the point of the periodical at large, particularly “the conditions of the production, dissemination, and appropriation of texts” that go along with it. 43 Only in its second year, the The Massachusetts Magazine’s editors had to confess that “expectations of Originality” were “delusively founded” and promised a way out by supplying the “vacant pages” with a “copious selection, both Foreign and Domestick.” 44 Literary magazines make texts available that had formerly only circulated in the polite world of wealth and belles lettres. Unacknowledged borrowings Such editorial statements demonstrate that the magazine’s value only exists in its relation to the exteriority of the readers. The magazine creates two expectations in combination: first, the expectation that the magazine organizes a readable space, and secondly, that it offers a procedure for the actualization of texts through arranging texts in thematic sequences. In other words, in a magazine the world of the text encounters the world of the reader. In contrast to specific modes of organizing textual material that impose meaning onto the reader (i.e., dogmatic discourses such as religion or politics), the magazine’s function lies in the actualization of texts and their meanings appropriated by readers or hearers, since magazines were sometimes also read aloud. The reproduction of texts in early American magazines does not seek to enhance the readable space. Rearranging, decontextualizing or extracting texts from other sources, magazines invest texts with a new meaning and status, and thus increase the range of textual appropriations on the readers’ side. In doing so, magazines move beyond specific groups of readers and appeal to various communities of new readers and their changing reading habits, aptitudes, qualifications, and predilections. 42 Gardner 55. Not only a “distiller,” the editor may fulfill different functions such as author, reader, publisher, printer that refer to the numerous activities of the agents in the eighteenth-century world of print. 43 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), 32. In light of current periodical research and its claim that magazines offer models of literary citizenship, Mayo holds that at least late eighteenth-century British editors, “[w]ith a shrewd sense of their audience’s vanities and naive aspirations, carefully cultivated its writing members, cajoling them into working for them gratis, praising their efforts effusively, and (what is worse) printing them as models of elegant composition” (356). The question is whether American editors greatly differ from their British “brethren,” as Thomas calls them. 44 In Lora and Longton 97. Migrant Fictions 209 from foreign textual sources exemplify how texts can be differently apprehended, manipulated, and comprehended in magazines. Besides their often rampant plagiarism, magazines provide new readability created by the fragmented arrangement of texts (serialization), for instance, that makes notions of a linear-textual effectuation appear obsolete. Magazines invite the reader to roam among the texts and frequently cater to the sensationalist inclinations of the public. The staging of texts in a serialized form, or the chopping up of old texts, and new ways of reading invite many different appropriations. Sometimes the specificity of a magazine text resides in the editorial changes. In order to maintain the magazine as a communitarian space, The Massachusetts Magazine relies on the recurrence of coded forms; for instance, the sentimental lead story is frequently accompanied by a frontispiece which encodes visually what follows in the text. Additionally, the magazine inscribes texts into a cultural matrix that is not the one that its original creator had in mind. The reprinting proposes texts that authorize new comprehensions and create new uses of these very texts. 3. Early Stories and the Appropriation of Magazine Fiction The anonymous story “The Child of Snow” was reprinted as a companion piece to one of Judith Sargent Murray’s essays which appeared first in the pages of the The Massachusetts Magazine and were compiled later into three volumes, titled The Gleaner (1798). 45 45 Margareta Melworth [Judith Sargent Murray],“The Gleaner. No. IX,” The Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment (Dec. 1, 1792): 713- 718. Murray’s essay is a moralizing piece that teaches marital conduct. It illustrates the conflict between desire and duty, between the “romantick ideas” (716) of a young lady and her anxieties to lose a “faultless virgin’s fame” (717). Her “guardian friends” and their commentaries frame the essay. They admonish her not to “sacrifice to the illusion of a moment, the happiness of life” (716). “The Child of Snow” enhances the cautionary subject position that the essay offers the reader by dramatizing the consequences of adultery. Whereas the essay plays with female youth, romantic ideas of love, and male seduction controlled by the heroine’s “guardian friends,” the appended story moves the “happiness of life” into the context of commerce and trade familiar to the magazine’s local audience. The remediation of short fiction highlights a literary practice closely related to the magazine’s role in the world of print. The mass of redacted and original stories establishes continuity between readers’ lives and the medium of print, between extra-textual experience and textual expression. The era’s literary outlets, such as periodicals, not only acclimated the reader to the consump- O LIVER S CHEIDING 210 tion of short fiction but also shaped what value readers accorded to it. The magazine’s textual arrangements made readers aware of how to consume texts. The Massachusetts Magazine establishes a publishing formula that reprints short fiction within a sentimental frame. It thereby repeatedly permits different readings and comprehensions of the copied fictions. In terms of a given text’s generic appeal for the reader, John Frow remarks that “[t]he story is not just a thing said but is also an act of enunciation which intervenes in, and in part constructs, a social relationship.” 46 In an American context, “The Child of Snow” contains thematic cues such as gender, profession, and region, which allow for a high degree of plausibility and exemplarity, at least for the magazine’s local readers. Once relocated in the magazine’s overall sentimental design, the medieval story gains a livelihood of its own with a different semiotic charge. So what kind of short story is “The Child of Snow” and what does it tell us about the miscellany character of short fiction as an extensive and diverse field of literary production, despite the fact that it has been considered ‘trashy’ by most post-romantic literary histories? 47 Editors kept a constant eye upon newspapers, monthly reviews, essayserials, and the growing number of collections of foreign stories, particularly French tales or other entertaining pieces. Apart from its bawdy tone and its depiction of the consequences of an adulterous relationship, Thomas selected the story not only for its brevity, but more so for its mixture of realistic and sensationalist elements as well as for its reduction of human relationships to formal patternings, often to be found in eighteenth-century fiction. Although an old text, it contains basic narrative features known to a general readership. The paucity of descriptive qualifiers and the type-like references to “the merchant,” “his wife,” “the husband,” and the “child” invite the reader to reimagine a marital drama of lies, moral pretensions, and sexual transgression in a contemporary context. The story itself is a fabliau, a genre of medieval comic tales, frequently depicting sexual or obscene topics in an unabashedly humorous way. The fabliau was never limited to any one social class, and writers borrowed freely from it as did Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, for instance. Eighteenth-century editors frequently used such ‘little fables’ to compensate for the lack of original stories at hand, but also reprinted them because of their simple, unsophisticated, and practical style. The fabliau favors a materialistic view of everyday life as it depicts people from the lower and middle walks of 46 John Frow, Genre (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), 115. 47 Mayo 351; Buell 31; cf. Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl, “Early American Short Narratives: The Art of Story-Telling Prior to Washington Irving,” Handbook to the American Short Story: Genres - Developments - Model Interpretations, eds. Michael Basseler and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2011), 205-219. Migrant Fictions 211 life. Altogether, it is more expansive and less didactic than the fable since it avoids a summary of the moral, and it puts a greater emphasis on the story. Expansion thereby refers to processes of appropriation made possible by textual cues that function, according to Frow, as “metacommunications.” 48 It was also common to append a fabliau to a moral tale in order to counterbalance its sometimes antifeminist sentiment. In such cases, the tale highlighted female ingenuity over a foolish husband. The Massachusetts Magazine reverts this pattern and annexes the story to an essay-serial written by “Constantia” (alias Judith Sargent Murray), one of the magazine’s most versatile and praised contributors. Published as an anonymous piece, it evokes the impression of an original contribution submitted by one of the magazine’s many “poetical friends,” or by someone who followed the editor’s “premonitions” which repeatedly address the “novellist’s” among the magazine’s consumers and elicit from them “[s]tories […] founded on verisimilitude” or “American tales.” They may stand out in very obvious ways, such as the husband’s “project of revenge” in “The Child of Snow,” or come to the fore in statements of condensed information: “It is needless to give the particulars of the journey, or an account of the countries through which he passed” (CS 718). Usually, the fabliau contains a twist at the end of the story, mostly in the form of an outwitted character. Apart from its brevity, these general attributes certainly account for its circulation in the amusement section of American newspapers, before such short pieces found their entrance into the miscellanies. 49 And yet, such reprints were in accordance with common editorial practices of the era and were sanctioned under the terms of the miscellanies’ obligation to “furnish to the publick an agreeable variety.” 50 constitutes three-fourths of the community; and that they are fond of “trifles light as air”; of the wild, the terrific, and the marvellous, as well as of the soft, the melting and the voluptuous. They do not read for instruction or profit, but to “kill time”; or gratify a liquorice taste; and therefore, they prefer such tales, as abound with stories of dæmons, hob-goblins, spectres, witches, haunted towers, churchyards, charnal houses, tombs, inchantments, murders, robberies, gods, goddesses, angels, divinities, demigods, heroes, heroines, lovers, etc. - or loves, gallantries, in- Even without having read the morally instructive remarks of the preceding essay, the reader can easily grasp the story’s imaginary occurrence because it accords to what has been called “light reading” or “small tales” that appealed to a growing unspecialized audience fascinated by short fictions. “This class of people,” as one correspondent harangues, 48 Frow 115. 49 “Premonitions,” The Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment (January 1, 1790): n.p. 50 “Acknowledgements to Correspondents,” London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 48 (1779): 432. O LIVER S CHEIDING 212 trigues, bastards, perjuries, murders, assassinations, hair-breadth-escapes, suicides, and an almost infinite chain of ridiculous and wild et ceteras. 51 Being itself a rare moment of insight into prevailing ‘popular’ reading habits, the comment reveals the extensive range of the era’s literature as well as the editors’ response to their consumers’ reading preferences. They provided their targeted readership with reliable variations on their favorite stories. It also reveals “the amorphous character of the eighteenth-century reading public,” 52 Looking at the story’s publishing history, one can see that its ‘point’ varies depending on the medium in which it is reprinted. The story’s appearance in the columns of the newspaper gives it a different framing impulse for an interpretation, conditioned by time and the speed of reading and consuming public notes. Although published in the amusement section, it could be emulated as a local event of a “wife [who] became enamoured of a young neighbour” (CS 718) upon the absence of her husband. Given the conservative frame of The Massachusetts Magazine that intends “to protect traditional American middle-class values of religion, morality, family, and social life,” and indicates that lengthy prose fiction aimed at a popular audience plays a minor role for the period’s publishing business. References to light reading that “kills time” show that short fiction induced qualitative changes in how readers and writers approached texts. The editorial blurb indicates the extensive nature of the magazine’s ‘other’ forms preferred by the period’s numerous readerships, who expected, among other things, sentiment, sensationalism, and surprise endings. Commentaries as the one above reveal the diversity of short forms provided by literary magazines. Conversely, it also suggests short fiction’s symbolic expansiveness that exceeds the boundaries of Enlightenment rationality and the era’s ubiquitous moral formulae often endorsed by literary magazines. The moral essay is, therefore, only one out of a wide range of favorite narrative forms supplied by editors to meet their audiences’ expectations. 53 51 “For the Philadelphia Repository,” Philadelphia Repository, and Weekly Register 2.33 (June 26, 1802): 261, probably written by David Hogan, the magazine’s editor. the story can be read as a cautionary narrative against adulterous relationships. It echoes the motif of a fallen woman or errant wife known to readers of sentimental literature. While The Massachusetts Magazine domesticates the fabliau convention within a sentimental framework, a similar piece of short fiction, published two years earlier in the Boston-based Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine (1789-1790), reinvents the fabliau and its lurid content under the cloak of sermonic truth-telling. “The Story of the Captain’s Wife” (1789) is an original story involving a seafaring husband and his lonely wife longing for his safe return from a long voyage at sea. She is reassured by 52 Mayo 213. 53 Lora and Longton 100. Migrant Fictions 213 a mysterious old woman who miraculously conducts her to her husband’s remote location one night in a sailboat transformed from a bushel basket. Husband and wife reunite, but he does not recognize her, although he traces in her countenance “every feature of [his] wife.” 54 Both stories consist of a mixture of realistic and magic elements that are reconciled in different ways. “The Story of a Captain’s Wife” emerges out of numerous narrative types such as the sermon, the exemplum, and the folk tale. Such amalgamated stories occur within tightly woven frame narratives. The exterior story resembles a sermon and reflects upon the first chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel and David’s repentance in the second Book of Samuel. The interior story is both exemplum and folk tale. While the exemplum narrates the couple’s separation and reunion, the folk tale adds to it a supernatural occurrence brought about by a spooky match-maker or ghost-figure, uncommon to the period’s stories of sentimental nature. The story proper derives from an oral source, “an aged clergyman of this Commonwealth,” whom the unnamed first person narrator happens to meet “in one of the capital towns on the American continent” (CW 483). Although the story is disguised as a clergyman’s sermonizing instruction, it caters to the “liquorice taste” of an audience that welcomed short fiction about lurid sexual encounters frequently involving subject matter such as bastards’ tales or young wives married to sea-faring men. He takes her to his bed and offers money to her for the affair, but she refuses the money and asks instead for a curious knife and fork that he owned. By morning she has returned home, and seven months later the husband returns to find that she is pregnant. He becomes enraged at her infidelity and wants to leave her, until she confronts him with the knife and fork. In a complete change of countenance, he begs for mercy and insists that she would not treat him the way he has treated her for the same crime. She forgives him and they live happily ever after. Both stories contain fairy-tale elements or magic promptings which permit different readings. In “The Child of Snow,” the wife’s supernaturally caused pregnancy is exposed as a lie. At the end of the story, the narrator’s apodictic comment leaves no question about the wife’s misconduct and restores the order of marital obligations. 55 54 Ruri Colla, “The Story of a Captain’s Wife,” Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine (October 1, 1789): 483-485; (November 1, 1789): 521; hereafter CW. The story echoes the Judah and Tamar narrative in Gen 38, 13-26 that deals with themes of love, prostitution, and honor. The mixture of narrative forms in 55 The 1818 reprint cuts this ending, as the story occurs in a different frame. This time, the story accompanies an essay entitled “The Friend of Women” that begins with the following statement: “Too much good or too much evil has always been ascribed to women” (122). Remnants of the story can be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Snow- Image: A Childish Miracle” whose final comment reads: “The remarkable story of the O LIVER S CHEIDING 214 “The Story of the Captain’s Wife” unfolds an ambivalent story that fuels the reader’s fantasy. Similar to “The Child of Snow,” the narrator makes no attempt to develop the characters; the lesson to be learned is, however, less clear since the story does not reconcile the realistic and supernatural elements. In contrast to “The Child of Snow,” the magic encounter does not reveal a lie but proves the legitimacy and naturalness of the wife’s pregnancy, and, at the same time, unravels both characters’ willingness to trespass sexual norms: the husband’s by showing his willingness to have sexual intercourse with any woman as long as she resembles his wife, and the wife’s by following a match-maker able to satisfy her hidden desires. Both stories show that the rise of the American short story is less about the outcome of who could seize both “native elements and borrowed literary sources” in order to “transform them into new, durable literary art,” 56 4. Conclusion but rather how texts are organized and circulated so that they achieve mobility across audiences. What follows from this analysis? First, early short stories, such as “The Child of Snow,” make us think about a new chapter in American literary history and the emergence of the American short story prior to Washington Irving. While earlier studies stressed either particular national themes or original authorship as central criteria for incorporating stories into a canon of early American short fiction, my reading evolves from the pluralities of migrant stories that circulate in magazines and shows how foreign literature is repackaged and redeployed, inviting readerly appropriations out of which an American story evolves. Migrant stories such as “The Child of Snow,” “The Adventures of an English Officer,” or “Azakia: A Canadian Story,” 57 snow-image […] may seem but a childish affair, is, nevertheless, capable of being moralized in various methods” (1853, 34). illustrate that readers could imagine different subject positions as they read them. Second, their ‘becoming’ American short stories uncovers the early story as an outcome of iteration and not origination. Their recognition as a ‘fiction of America’ remains frequently a local and short-lived phenomenon, unacknowledged by later generations of consumers and their changing readerly appropriations. Therefore, future studies on the American short story should be embedded within “a social history of the uses and under- 56 Current-García 17. 57 Translated from Nicolas Bricaire de la Dixmerie’s Contes philosophiques et moraux (Paris, 1765), the story was reprinted in a German translation in Der Neuschottländische Kalender, 1788, followed by English versions in The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, 1789, The New-York Magazine, or Literary Repository, 1797 and The Desert to the True American, 1798. Migrant Fictions 215 standings of texts by communities of readers who, successively, take possession of them.” 58 And finally, sometimes used as mere filler text, but sometimes also selected by editors because of their thematic appeal to a reading public, these stories develop a life of their own as they enter the plural readerly and writerly world of the magazine. Their lack of originality should therefore not cause their exclusion from future anthologies that seek to trace the emergence of the American short story in the pages of the magazine. Given the amalgam of fact and fiction in magazines, readers were being acclimated to imaginative prose of a distinctive modern cast well before the rise of the novel. The American short story has a long pre-history that cannot be explained simply in terms of an evolutionary and generic scheme, or as what Pitcher calls “a gradual coming together of forms,” 59 58 Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performance, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P, 1995), 92. but must take into account the magazine’s agency in re-classifying European texts as early American short stories. 59 Pitcher 2000, 1. O LIVER S CHEIDING 216 Works Cited “Acknowledgements to Correspondents.” London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 48 (1779): 432. Arac, Jonathan. “Anglo-Globalism? ” New Left Review 16 (2002): 35-45. Arner, Robert D. “‘The Child of Snow’: A Misidentified ‘Early American’ Short Story.” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 98-100. Bannet, Eve Tavor. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810, Migrant Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Bannet, Eve Tavor, and Susan Manning, eds. 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If we simply look at the denotative sense as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, there is not much to be found in terms of politics: “the action or process of moving; change of position or posture; passage from place to place, or from one situation to another.” 1 That in reality ideologies cannot be reduced to this simple criterion has frequently been remarked. As far as conservatism - my principal interest here - is concerned, Kevin Gilmartin explains: “To assign conservative thought and action to a straightforward preservation campaign is to accept uncritically one of conservatism’s own legitimating mythologies.” Nevertheless, the concept is used for one of the most fundamental distinctions between political orientations, namely the contrast between progressivism and conservatism. However differently they may be defined in various contexts, these political persuasions are conceptualized with the imagery of movement and change: to progress after all means to ‘move forward in space’ and to conserve to ‘keep in a certain state’. Not only are movement and change closely connected, but movement is also very often the central metaphor for change. The attitudes towards change are, in turn, regarded as essential to these political worldviews. 2 From our perspective, it may not be easily understood that mobility can be very negatively connoted. But this was the case when conservatism came into being in England during the French Revolution. In the present study, I am going to show that a distrust and a denigration of movement were in fact important elements in the formation of conservatism and that this strongly affected the structure of conservative narrative literature. While there have been several attempts to define this ideology by enumerating its positions on governmental, social, cultural and religious questions, What is more, today’s proponents of different political camps have elevated personal mobility to the status of a cardinal virtue. Modern man likes to be seen as dynamic and flexible. The corporate interest requires mobility; politicians of all hues - conservatives no less than others - advocate it. 3 1 “movement, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition; online version December, 2011. I propose to under- 2 Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 12. 3 Manfred G. Schmidt, Wörterbuch zur Politik (Stuttgart: Kröner, 3 2010), 424. P ASCAL F ISCHER 220 stand conservatism as a weltanschauung that is, at least partly, metaphorically conditioned. My theoretical framework is cognitive metaphor theory, which has directed our attention to the fact that our perception of reality is to a large extent based on metaphors. 4 Anti-Jacobins, as conservatives started calling themselves at that time, 5 After outlining the historical framework of early conservatism as well as the current state of research, I shall look at examples of individual images from several kinds of anti-Jacobin texts that are built upon the contrast between mobility and stability. Glancing at the other side of the political spectrum, I will then briefly demonstrate that the radicals of the lower classes ironically accepted ‘mobility’ as a self-designation. In a further step, I will examine how the dichotomy between ‘movement’ and ‘constancy’ is translated into the narrative make-up of the anti-Jacobin novel. drew heavily on the contrast between mobility and immobility to depict their own world-view and that of their political opponents. Embracing stability as a central constituent of their identity, conservatives regularly voice their aversion to movement and present mobility as a serious threat to everything the English nation treasures. Historical and political studies largely concur that conservatism as a coherent ideology did not emerge before the industrial and political “dual revolution,” as Eric Hobsbawm called the time around 1800. 6 According to John Western, “British conservatism, as a conscious political force, is a product of the French Revolution.” 7 Whereas older research identified Edmund Burke as the sole “founding father” 8 of conservatism and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the principal reference point for all subsequent anti- Jacobin endeavors, 9 4 See e.g. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980); Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2 2010). more recent publications understand this ideology in its early phase as a mass movement supported by many writers from all layers 5 The term conservative was not used in the modern sense before the second decade of the nineteenth century; see James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative. Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 4-6. The first printed evidence of the use of anti-Jacobin stems from the year 1794: Alexander Watson, The anti- Jacobin. A Hudibrastic Poem in Twenty-one Cantos (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1794). 6 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962), xv; 2; 3; passim. 7 John R. Western, “The Volunteer Movement as an Anti-Revolutionary Force, 1793- 1801,” The English Historical Review 71.281 (1956): 603. 8 Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism. Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher (London: Longman, 1986), 12. 9 The following quotation by Peter Viereck is typical of this older view: “Almost singlehanded, he [Burke] turned the intellectual tide from a rationalist contempt for the past to a traditionalist reverence for it.” Peter Viereck, Conservatism. From John Adams to Churchill (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1956 [Reprint 1978]), 25. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 221 of society. 10 The reason why the French Revolution is such a decisive phase in the development of political orientations in England is that it triggered a broad discussion about elementary questions of the English political system. Alfred Cobban famously called the French Revolution Debate “the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in this country” What has still not been sufficiently considered, though, is the role of narrative literature in spawning and disseminating conservative ideas. My research is based on a large corpus of non-fictional, semi-fictional and fictional writing directed against the Revolution in France and radical ideas in Britain. 11 An intense controversy raged which produced one of the most voluminous and theoretically significant bodies of political literature, indeed the most important debate about democratic principles, in British history. and Gregory Claeys explained: 12 However, in the years after the fall of the Bastille, English anti-Jacobins avoided intricate questions like the possible reform of the franchise or the abolition of rotten boroughs. Instead, most authors depicted the constitutional system in a general manner by drawing on a set of metaphors that are indicative of the perception of the self and the other. In setting up an opposition between an idealized English constitution and a negative picture of revolutionary France, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France strongly relies on the imagery of stability here and mobility there, as the following example illustrates: “Standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to admire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aëronauts of France.” 13 10 Harry T. Dickinson, “Counter-revolution in Britain in the 1790s,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 102 (1989): 354-67; Harry T. Dickinson, “Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s,” The Transformation of Political Culture. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 503-33; Mark Philp, “Vulgar Conservatism, 1792-3,” The English Historical Review 110.435 (1995): 42-69. In this vignette, Burke and the compatriots he addresses are standing, while the French are moving in a balloon. By relating the immobility of the spectators to the firmness of the British constitution, the national character and the constitutional history of England are aligned. Constancy is depicted as a virtue of national identity. The verb admire must either be seen as ironic, or, in an older usage, as neutral in the sense of ‘to view with wonder or surprise; to wonder or marvel at’. For this meaning, the OED gives examples like “to admire the 11 Alfred Cobban, The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789-1800 (London: Kaye, 1950), 31. 12 Gregory Claeys, “Introduction,” Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol. 1: Radicalism and Reform: Responses to Burke 1790-1791, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), xviii. 13 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition, ed. Jonathan C.D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001 [ 1 1790]), 414. P ASCAL F ISCHER 222 stupidity” or to “admire the madness.” 14 The word desperate indicates the loss of control this means of transportation entails and points to the dangers of such a journey. Evidently, the risks of airborne locomotion were very real, and Burke’s readers will certainly have remembered the conflagration of the Irish town of Tullamore on 10 May 1785, which was caused by the emergency landing of a hot-air balloon and is deemed to be the first aeronautical catastrophe in history. 15 The association of what was then often called ‘French philosophy’ with ballooning was facilitated by the fact that almost all the pioneers of aerial navigation in the 1780s were French: the Montgolfier brothers, Jacques Alexandre César Charles, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and others. It is documented that Edmund Burke attended an ascension by Blanchard on 9 May 1785, the day before the Tullamore disaster. Despite standing on firm ground, Burke was not altogether safe: his purse and watch were stolen in the crowd. 16 A similar image is used by Arthur Young in his The Example of France, a Warning to Britain of 1793. In this pamphlet, Young deals with Thomas Paine’s criticism in the second part of the radical pamphlet Rights of Man (1792) that governments relying on the authority of earlier decisions “hobble along by the stilts and crutches of precedent”: 17 They fly at the objects of their rapine: while in a more humble course, governments, by precedent, hobble slowly, but surely, towards the great land-marks of individual happiness and national prosperity. - If stilts and crutches have brought us to that goal, we need not envy the aerial flight or inflammable wings of balloon philosophers. 18 Travelling by balloon is again presented as highly precarious. The image of the “inflammable wings” evokes the moral fable of Icarus as a warning against human hubris. The attempt to fly, the implicit message goes, amounts to a violation of the natural order, which is subject to the dictates of gravity. For man, nothing but moving at a slow pace appears to be adequate. Young picks up Paine’s accusation of the lameness of the present constitution and tries to turn it into an asset. The example shows that in their dispute about the political system the opposing parties resorted to general categories of which movement was of eminent significance. On the one hand, Young’s 14 “admire, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition; online version, December 2011. 15 Michael Byrne, “The Tullamore Balloon Fire - First Air Disaster in History,” (Offaly Historical and Archaeological Society website, 2007). <http: / / www.offalyhistory.com/ articles/ 72/ 1/ The-Tullamore-Balloon-Fire---First-Air-Disaster-in-History/ Page1.html> 16 Michael R. Lynn, The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783-1820 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), 109. 17 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 250. 18 Arthur Young, The Example of France, a Warning to Britain (London: W. Richardson, 4 1794 [ 1 1793]), 21. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 223 metaphor allows for some - albeit very slow - advancement, on the other, he asserts that the English have reached their goal already and need not proceed any further. By and large, anti-Jacobin authors accept the enlightenment conceptualization of history as a linear, teleological progression that involves improvement. For many of them, however, the aim has already been achieved. This idea is clearly expressed by Hannah More in her anti-Jacobin dialogue Village Politics (1793). Here, the conservative figure Jack tries to convince his misguided friend Tom of the value of the established system with the metaphor of a race for liberty, in which the British have reached the finishing line, while the French have just set out from the starting post: “We’ve got it, man; we’ve no race to run. We’re there already.” 19 Instead of commenting on the defects of the new form of government in France, anti-Jacobin authors more often criticize that it was quickly set up. The English constitution on the other hand, is eulogized for the slowness with which it developed. According to the farmer in John Bowles’ Dialogues on the Rights of Britons, Between a Farmer, A Sailor, and a Manufacturer (1792), “the French pretended to do at once what the English were so long in performing; for the former have only verified the old saying, that what is hastily done is ill done. Great changes can only be made to advantage by very slow degrees.” 20 The farmer furthermore conveys this conviction with the help of an organic metaphor which is very characteristic of conservative discourse: “Ours [Our constitution], like the English Oak, has arrived by slow degrees at maturity, and, like the English Oak too, is useful and durable, forming the strength, while it secures the lasting happiness of the Nation.” 21 19 Hannah More, Village Politics. Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers in Great Britain. By Will Chip, A Country Carpenter (1793), Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol. 8: Loyalism 1793-1800, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 6. The slow growth of this endemic plant, which is supposed to epitomize English identity, can be linked to the accumulation of experience and wisdom, which take a long time to flower, too. The density and hardness of the tree, moreover, ensure its superior usefulness. Sluggishness and persistence can thus be depicted as prerequisites for solidity, and hence for quality. The common knowledge that slow-growing wood is harder and more robust than fastgrowing wood is elaborated on by the sailor in the conversation. In this case, the English constitution is contrasted with the American political system: “English Oak is, as you say, slow in growth, but then it excels all other timber. That of America grows much quicker, but the ships built of it go sooner 20 John Bowles, Dialogues on the Rights of Britons, Between a Farmer, A Sailor, and a Manufacturer (1792), in: Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol 7: Loyalism 1791-3, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 251. 21 Bowles 249. P ASCAL F ISCHER 224 to decay.” 22 Connected with the praise of stability and constancy is the language of inclusion and containment. Whereas radical authors celebrate the developments in France with images of opened prison doors and broken fetters, anti- Jacobins emphasize the benefits of immuring and sealing. When Burke defends the institution of the prison as a response to the radicals’ idealization of the storming of the Bastille, he does not mention educational, moral or metaphysical reasons, but highlights the necessity of confinement, for instance, when he asks: “Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell? ” The image, which yokes the organic metaphor of the tree and the classical view of the state as a ship, does not foreclose change. It is the rapid pace that is to be distrusted. 23 While in Burke’s description of revolutionary France criminals and madmen are running around uninhibited, they are fortunately held back in Britain, as in the case of Lord Gordon, whose incarceration for libel Burke applauds: “We have Lord George Gordon fast in Newgate […] We have rebuilt Newgate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as strong as the Bastile [sic].” 24 For Burke in particular, the social processes are always in danger of getting out of hand and must therefore be contained. Even the ideals he most highly cherishes might become a threat if unchecked. When in the following metaphor Burke uses a certain gas as source domain, he conforms to a common practice of conservative authors at that time. In the physical world, gas particles continually move and diffuse and can therefore easily be aligned to the revolutionary movement and its dangers: “When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work […] The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose.” Seclusion effects a healthy immobilization as a defence against turmoil and anarchy, which are related to movement. 25 22 Bowles 249. At first sight, liberty might here seem like steam that needs to be sealed in a kettle, if it is not to stream out wildly. In the next sentence, however, Burke uses the word “effervescence,” which rather evokes the image of bubbling fluid in a chemical experiment. The association of subversive politics and chemical analysis was well chosen, since one of the leaders of the radical movement in Britain was also an eminent scientist who studied gases: Joseph Priestley. Not only did he discover oxygen - the achievement he is best remembered for today - but he also studied carbon dioxide, which was then called “fixed air.” Carbonated water appears stable 23 Burke 151. 24 Burke 247. 25 Burke 152. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 225 in a sealed container, but if you open the lid, it might gush out uncontrollably. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke repeatedly depicts the radical ideology as a sudden, dynamic eruption. After cheering the English system and its “fixed form of a constitution” 26 Let them be their amusement in the schools. “Illa se jactet in aula - Æolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.” But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us. for its solidity and slowly accumulated experience, he turns his attention to the radical philosophers. Feigning generosity, he first allows them to devote themselves to speculation in a room of their own: 27 With the exclamation “In that hall let Aeolus lord it and rule within the barred prison of the winds,” 28 The Archdeacon of Carlisle, William Paley, who is nowadays best known for his work on Natural Theology and for his abolitionist position, but who also possessed an authoritative voice within the anti-Jacobin camp, prefers less violent images. Yet, he shows the same appreciation for immobility. In his 1792 pamphlet Reasons for Contentment, Paley appeals to the common man to accept his humble lot and disregard the wealth of the higher ranks: Neptune chastises the rebellious god of the winds in Virgil’s Aeneid. In line with Burke’s commendation of prisons, the image of the contained winds captures his idea that the radical philosophy is only harmless as long as it is not applied to real politics. At the same time, the metaphor of the hurricane epitomizes the idea of movement as a hazard. Just like the agitated but ultimately vacuous radicals, a severe wind hardly possesses any substance, is almost pure movement, but nonetheless extremely dangerous. In this passage, one movement triggers the other in a kind of chain reaction: the storm causes the upsurge of a fountain, with equally disastrous consequences. He enjoys, therefore, ease in this respect, and ease resulting from the best cause, the power of keeping his imagination at home; of confining it to what belongs to himself, instead of sending forth to wander amongst speculations which have neither limits nor use, amidst views of unattainable grandeur, fancied happiness, of extolled, because unexperienced, privileges and delights. 29 26 Burke 217. 27 Burke 217. 28 P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneis I, 140-1. English translation according to Jonathan C.D. Clark’s critical edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, 217. 29 William Paley, Reasons for Contentment; Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792), in: Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol 7: Loyalism 1791-3, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 219-20. P ASCAL F ISCHER 226 The difference between an exaggerated and a modest imagination is here expressed as the contrast between nearness and distance as well as stasis and movement. “Keeping [the] imagination at home” is not only a virtue but the prerequisite for a fulfilled, happy life. Although in this passage the opposition of ‘being at home’ and ‘wandering about’ is used metaphorically for mental activities, it also has a nonmetaphorical component. The lower classes were called upon to remain near their houses, where they could be watched, controlled and maybe morally reformed by their betters. 30 Like other anti-Jacobin writers, Paley commended the immobile domestic country-life, as it was not only supposed to further responsible behaviour towards one’s wife and children but also an apolitical, conformist attitude, far away from the corrosive influence of the ever-busy city. Some of the pamphlets, however, give voice to the concern that the rural idyll could be destroyed by travelling outsiders, who either operate as orators or as circulators of subversive writings. William Atkinson warns in his An Oblique View of the Grand Conspiracy Against Social Order: “It is a wellknown fact, that Hawkers and Pedlars of every description, have throughout Europe been employed to disseminate cheap Editions of Sedition.” 31 The conservatives’ frequent association of radicalism with movement was facilitated by the fact that a close cognitive connection between the disobedient and uncontrollable lower classes and mobility had already been established before the time of the French Revolution. The clearest evidence for that can be found in the English vocabulary itself. Not only did the word mob, which is an abbreviation of the Latin mobile vulgus - ‘the fickle crowd’ - experience a steep ascent in the eighteenth century, 32 When you look up ‘mobility’ in the OED, you will not only find the entry that indicates the meaning we frequently draw on today, but also a second entry, “mobility, n. 2 ,”which contains the commentary “now historical and rare.” The word was formed in analogy to nobility, but was, of course, used as an antonym to it, referring to the opposite on the social spectrum: “the mob, the rabble; the common people; the working-classes.” but there was also another term available: the word ‘mobility’ itself. The expression was used since the end of the seventeenth century as a synonym for the boisterous human rabble. It is probably due to the derogatory connotations of “mobility, n. 2 ” that it was not used directly by anti-Jacobin propagandists to denigrate their politi- 30 John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism. Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 213-14. 31 William Atkinson, An Oblique View of the Grand Conspiracy, against Social Order; or, A Candid Inquiry, Tending to Shew what Part The Analytical, the Monthly, the Critical Reviews, and The New Annual Register, Have Taken in that Conspiracy (London: J. Wright, 1798), 4. 32 “mob, n. 2 (and adv.),” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition; online version, December 2011. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 227 cal enemies, as that would have compromised their position with the lower ranks they wanted to convince, even though Burke uses ‘mob’ with much relish in the Reflections. 33 The fact, however, that conservatives frequently linked radicalism with movement, did not go unnoticed by the radicals and gave new currency to the term. It was characteristic for popular radicals at that time to gleefully embrace the insults that were hurled at them as signs of identification. The expression “the swinish multitude,” 34 which Burke famously used in the Reflections to disparage the mob, was accepted by many as an ironic self-designation. 35 In the same manner ‘mobility’ can sometimes be found in radical writings to refer to the lower classes with self-confidence and pride. In The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson explains: “‘Mobility’ was a term proudly adopted by nineteenth-century Radicals and Chartists for their peaceable and well-conducted demonstrations.” 36 That this was already the case in the 1790s can, for instance, be illustrated by the satirical playbill by the radical bookseller Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, entitled An Entire Change of Performances? (1795). 37 The broadside announces an exciting new spectacle to be performed on the streets of the metropolis by “the Swinish Multitude.” A euphemism for revolution, this ‘performance’ will not be palatable to the nobility, but to its perceived antipode, the ‘mobility.’ Where the proper theatre performances of the day boasted their orientation towards the nobility (particularly in the so-called ‘private theatricals’), 38 33 Burke draws on the term several times to describe the masses in the French Revolution as well as in the Gordon Riots of 1780. Referring to the fact that Gordon “raised a mob,” Burke explains to his French addressee Charles-Jean-François Depont: “excuse the term, it is still in use here” (Burke 247). this spectacle will “accommodate the Taste of the Mobility of this Country.” 34 Burke 242. 35 Examples include: James Parkinson, An Address, to the Hon. Edmund Burke. From the Swinish Multitude (London: J. Ridgway, 1793); Thomas Spence, One Pennyworth of Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (London: T. Spence, 1793). See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 79-85; Darren Howard, “Necessary Fictions: The ‘Swinish Multitude’ and the Rights of Man,” Studies in Romanticism 47.2 (2008): 161. 36 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 73. 37 Richard Lee [bookseller], An Entire Change of Performances? (London, 1795). 38 Gillian Russell, “Private theatricals,” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730- 1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 191-97. See also Allardyce Nicoll on the satiric reactions towards the fad of aristocratic “private performances” in the late 18 th century: “The aping by amateurs of the graces of professional actors, the aristocratic audiences and the servility of the newspapers, which gave special columns to this latest freak of fashion […] all come under the lash of the satirists.” Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900. Vol. III: Late Eighteenth- Century Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1952), 21. John Barrell writes about satirical advertisements like An Entire Change of Performances? : “The mock-advertisements mobi- P ASCAL F ISCHER 228 Significantly, the term “swinish multitude” as well as the idea of the French Revolution as spectacle were borrowed from Burke, who had, for instance, referred to the upheavals across the Channel as a “monstrous tragicomic scene.” 39 The demonization of mobility brought about by countless metaphors in the pamphlet literature of the 1790s, as well as the concrete fear of insurgent vagabonds and violent uproars coalesced to give structure to the anti-Jacobin novel, which was mainly a product of the late 1790s and early 1800s. After literary scholars had for a long time regarded the political novel of that period as the exclusive domain of progressive authors, recent research has shown that many more novels were published on the conservative side of the political spectrum. While the term ‘mobility’ does not appear in his pamphlet, the association between the radical masses and movement is in keeping with the spirit of anti-Jacobin propaganda in general. 40 To speak of the anti-Jacobin novel as a literary subgenre appears to be justified inasmuch as many of these works share certain characteristics on the levels of story and narration. Typically, these novels centre on a villain figure that is bent on spreading subversive ideas and inciting rebellion. The majority of these agents provocateurs come from France to Britain in order to enlist the forces of discontent there, but some are Englishmen driven by a false ideology or simply by greed, lust and an inflated ego. What almost all of these radicals have in common is their amazing mobility. Their ramblings through England - or even through the world - drive the plots. Although few of the anti-Jacobin authors highlighted the nomadic existence of their characters as obviously as George Walker did with the title of his 1799 novel The Vagabond, several others quite consciously positioned themselves within the picaresque tradition. Charles Lucas’s title The Infernal Quixote (1801) is a nod toward Miguel de Cervantes; and Isaac D’Israeli mentions two landmark lise a language with which any reader of newspapers, anyone indeed walking the streets of London, would have been thoroughly familiar. […] Playbills were stuck up on every dead wall in London and in every major town in the country.” John Barrell, “Radicalism, Visual Culture, and Spectacle in the 1790s,” Romanticism on the Net 46 (2007). http: / / id.erudit.org/ iderudit/ 016131ar 39 Burke 155. Research has extensively commented on Burke’s theatrical imagery. See e.g. Julie Carlson, “Commanding Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schiller’s Dramatic Reflection on the Revolution in France,” Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992): 117-34; Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 138-63; Anne Mallory, “Burke, Boredom, and the Theatre of Counterrevolution,” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 224-38; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution: 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 57-87. 40 Matthew O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel. British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), Gilmartin 150-206. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 229 picaresque texts in the advertisement to his 1797 novel Vaurien, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas. 41 I want to argue that the conservatives’ polar perception of the world, which I illustrated with examples of individual metaphors, namely the high regard for stability and the concomitant depreciation of movement, is responsible for the choice of narrative form. By using the picaresque pattern, anti-Jacobin authors were not only able to demonstrate the particular dangers of itinerant political agitators, but could also, on a much more abstract level, point to the threat any kind of mobility and therefore change entails. Just as the villain serves as a personification of radicalism - commonly referred to as the ‘new philosophy’ by conservatives - his mobility represents the sway of the loathed ideas, which might intrude into every nook and cranny of the country. These novels create the impression that England is divided into a stable benevolent majority and a sinister, fickle minority, which poses, in spite of their small number, a great danger to society. Typically, the anti-Jacobin novel follows the conventional picaresque episodic structure. The reader watches the picaro, who is sometimes pitiable but mostly contemptible, roam the country to engage in his malicious activities. While the direct motivation for his adventures varies from novel to novel and from one episode to the next, they are all rendered possible by the lack of social rootedness. Having imbibed William Godwin’s teachings, Frederick Fenton, the central character in Walker’s Vagabond, dissolves all bonds of family and friendship and then goes on a long journey. The immediate reason for leaving is that he has to escape being hanged for arson and possibly murder. Thus, his movement is linked to crime from the very beginning. Most of the time, however, Frederick is driven on by his intention to spread the radical doctrine: “I rambled over great parts of the country under different professions […]. Wherever I went I disseminated the new doctrine of universal emancipation.” 42 But England is not enough for Frederick. Together with a bunch of other radicals he embarks on a voyage to America to found a colony there, which Walker modelled on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and Robert Southey’s scheme for a Pantisocracy. But even in the New World, the revolutionaries are not prepared to settle. Refusing to cultivate the land, one of them suggests: “To be perfectly free, […] we should become like the roaming Indians.” 43 41 Isaac D’Israeli, Vaurien: or, Sketches of the Times (1797), ed. Nicola Trott. Vol. 8. Anti- Jacobin Novels, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 11. Their ensuing meanderings are not only supposed to show the alleged fidgety disposition of these would-be philosophers but also their complete disorientation, for instance when we learn that “[o]ur troop of 42 George Walker, The Vagabond. A Novel (1799), ed. W.M. Verhoeven (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), 178. 43 Walker 201. P ASCAL F ISCHER 230 philosophical vagabonds set out, they knew not wither,” 44 or: “They had continued their journey, merely from the restless spirit of rambling.” 45 Similarly in The Democrat (1796), a novel by the then Poet Laureate Henry James Pye, the French anti-hero Le Noir starts travelling when his criminal behaviour isn’t countenanced in his hometown anymore. In the course of only five pages we are tracing his itinerary from France to Boston as part of a revolutionary regiment, then back to France, and finally to England, where his campaign to sow the seeds of discontent is only just beginning. Le Noir is always on the move, be it on foot, on horseback or by coach. It would be wrong to conclude, on the basis of the examples given so far, that movement in the anti-Jacobin novel is mainly associated with the lowerclass existence of tramps and vagrant misfits - in spite of the semantics of “mobility, n. 2 .” The attacks mounted by some anti-Jacobin novels on the itinerant life-style of the nobility do not only prove that a definition of late eighteenth-century conservatism as an aristocratic doctrine is untenable, 46 but also that it was movement itself that was condemned, not only when it concerned the lower orders. Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote is constructed around the contrast between the honest son of a carpenter called Wilson, who hardly leaves his village, and the mischievous Lord Marauder, whose name points to his iniquity as well as his mobility. In this novel, it is the peripatetic manner of the aristocracy that fosters the intrusion of radical ideas into England. A descendant of the eighteenth-century literary type of the libertine or rake, Marauder, aged fifteen, makes a pass at the wife of a relative, and is consequently sent to the Continent. 47 On his travels through Italy and France he encounters all kinds of pernicious ideas circulating in the higher ranks of society, which lead him to a complete disregard of conventions in sexual or religious matters and finally to embracing radicalism as a means to his licentious ends. It is significant that Marauder’s assaults on the virtue of the young Emily are successful when they are both travelling in a coach. The movement of that vehicle is clearly connected to the loss of sexual control, even though the narrator first expresses himself cautiously: “Whether the rumbling of a four-wheeled carriage inspires the tender passion, I am not casuist enough to determine.” 48 44 Walker 211. But then it turns out that the speed of the coach corresponds closely to Emily’s amorous excitement: 45 Walker 212. 46 Pascal Fischer, Literarische Entwürfe des Konservatismus in England 1790 bis 1805 (München, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 133-74. 47 Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote. A Tale of the Day (1801), ed. Matthew O. Grenby (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), 55. 48 Lucas 90. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 231 The drivers came to the brow of a steep hill, and dashed down it with such a spirit, that they seemed to fly over the soil. Poor Emily believed herself a little deity; and was ready, with a complete stock of modern philosophy, to be the victim of any vice the sophistry of her lover might point to. 49 Although Marauder, whose life is described as “a bustle of political intrigue,” 50 and who has a “restless and enterprising mind,” 51 In Jane West’s anti-Jacobin novel A Tale of the Times (1799) the mobility of the aristocratic ‘new philosopher’ determines the narrative structure as well. Even more than Lucas, West distinguishes her fictional characters according to the personality traits composure and restlessness, particularly when the author contrasts two types of nobility. From the very beginning, the anti- Jacobin role model Sir William Powerscourt, who is always prepared to defend conventional gender roles, patriarchal morality and established religion, is presented as totally averse to moving. Conversely, those fashionable aristocrats in the novel who are negligent of their social and moral duties cannot endure to stay anywhere very long. It is this unsteady, voguish society that permits the entrance of all kinds of ‘French ideas,’ from sexual permissiveness to revolutionary thought. While Sir Powerscourt shows a “strong attachment to the seat of his ancestors,” resembles the lower-class villains of other anti-Jacobin novels with regard to his agitation, his actions are much more deliberate, for instance when he goes to Ireland to spearhead the rebellion of 1798. 52 his nagging wife always wants to travel, first to Bath, then to the metropolis, since “[t]he itinerary world, at whose idol shrine she had resolved to sacrifice, had now transferred its scene of empire to London.” 53 To this flippant lot Powerscourt “formed as direct a contrast […] as the sturdy oak does to the bending ease of the pliant willow,” 54 In order to trace the cognitive structure of an ideology, it is, nonetheless, insufficient to merely point to a few individual images like the oak, as has often been done. according to the narrator with the telling name of Prudentia Homespun. The metaphor of the oak, which we have encountered before, reminds us that the conservative conceptualization of the world shows considerable coherence. 55 49 Lucas 92. What is much more significant is the underlying 50 Lucas 94. 51 Lucas 148. 52 Jane West, A Tale of the Times (1799), ed. Amanda Gilroy. Vol. 7. Anti-Jacobin Novels, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 14. 53 West 20. 54 West 20. 55 See e.g. William Ruddick, “Liberty Trees and Royal Oaks: Emblematic Presences in some English Poems of the French Revolutionary Period,” Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993), P ASCAL F ISCHER 232 systematicity of certain properties of the metaphors. As I have shown, the binary opposition between constancy and movement is of such centrality to the conservative world-view that it considerably affected the narrative form of early conservative novels. If we accept Matthew Grenby’s thesis that the anti-Jacobin campaign “endowed the novel with a respectability which it had not enjoyed since the days of Richardson and Fielding” 56 and thus prepared its enormous success in the nineteenth century, the insight into the connection between metaphoric conceptualization and narrative form contributes to the elucidation of a segment of the literary history of that time. But these findings can also be interpreted with regard to literary theory. My observations, for instance, corroborate Jurij Lotman’s emphasis on the spatial structure of narrative literature. 57 Hans Ulrich Seeber has argued that the concepts of Geschwindigkeit - ‘speed’ - and Langsamkeit - ‘slowness’ - became highly charged at the end of the eighteenth century. In his book Mobilität und Moderne he writes: “In the intellectual culture of modernity these terms lose their innocence.” But whereas his semiotic model is largely premised on the existence of at least two distinct topographical spaces charged with semantic value and on a transgression of the barriers between them, anti-Jacobin writing of the 1790s and early 1800s shows that movement itself must be taken as an important category in its own right, independent of the question of barriers. The fact that the protagonist is in motion does not automatically convey either a revolutionary or a restitutive message (to use Lotman’s terminology). The degree to which anti-Jacobin authors emphasize their distrust of movement, is, however, unusual and must be understood in its particular historical context. 58 This clearly also applies to the category of movement in general. But whereas Seeber cautiously suggests some subversive potential in slowness and even calls it “a critical counter-image to the civilization of speed,” 59 59-67; Paul Goetsch, “The English Oak: The Changing Fortunes of a Political Icon,” Symbolism 8 (2008): 279-321. I hope to have shown that in the conservative propaganda of the 1790s and early 1800s ‘slowness’ was first and foremost associated with the forces of preservation. 56 Grenby 208. 57 Jurij M. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated from the Russian by Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1977). 58 Hans Ulrich Seeber, Mobilität und Moderne. Studien zur englischen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), 21: “In der Reflexionskultur der Moderne verlieren diese Begriffe ihre Unschuld.” 59 Seeber 22: “ein kritisches Gegenbild zur Geschwindigkeitszivilisation.” The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 233 Works Cited Atkinson, William. 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U HLIG The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric That rhetoric has lost its classical preeminence has long been a refrain of intellectual and cultural modernity. Whether we date the resources, and lasting challenges, of an evolving present from the threshold of Romanticism, Lockean epistemology, or the earlier departures from an overwhelmingly discursive model of enquiry in Bacon or Descartes - it looks like a foundational truism that rhetoric has vanished as a global paradigm for cogent speech or writing. That rhetoric ought to be discarded, stripped of its false glories, or at least tightly controlled has been a programmatic claim not just for modernist aesthetics and poetics, but more broadly for the methods of philosophy and natural sciences. As if to formalize this late Platonic victory against sophistic skills, the modern school and university curriculum has more or less removed all opportunity for the systematic study of rhetorical techniques. Against the background of such ample evidence that rhetoric died more than a minor death across the modern period, this essay revisits a literary and institutional environment in which the disestablishment of rhetoric occurred so late, and gradually enough, as to be nearly imperceptible. The Scottish and, before long, North American attempt to recast rhetoric alongside belles lettres sought, inductively, to rederive its lessons from vernacular models of style. It also called upon the critical resources that had come to be available by the mid-eighteenth century in the adjacent studies of poetics and aesthetics. This self-consciously updated disciplinary project proved in many ways surprisingly successful and adaptable within a larger institutional and intellectual framework that was ultimately stacked against it. Its protracted, nearly silent death is a revealing episode in the extended, and itself often quite open-ended, inconclusive history of literary studies. Although there are resonances here with openly Hegelian idioms like the end of art, the widespread diagnosis of the death, or disestablishment, of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rests, by comparison, on a much broader base of concrete evidence. Precisely since it was moreover made, and championed from the outset, by modernity’s protagonists, the corresponding judgement by the present-day historian involves a different kind of claim. Hegel’s own thesis of the end of art did not entail that artmaking, or even great or revolutionary art, must end. What Hegel formulated as a feature of his systematically historicized philosophy was that, in virtue of the progress of self-knowledge, man’s ultimate relationship with art S TEFAN H. U HLIG 238 had necessarily changed. What had been lost was not the cultural institution but the “need for art” in the most spiritually pressing, universal sense Hegel ascribed to earlier societies, a need that was henceforth to be met by philosophy itself. To that extent, Hegel’s contention that art “in its highest vocation” had long become a “thing of the past” does nothing to challenge its enduring prominence as both a practice and an object of reflection, or indeed concerted study. 1 Much work, not least in literary studies, over recent decades has served to develop and to complicate our understanding of the obsolescence of perhaps the most wide-rangingly important intellectual technology in classical or early modern contexts. We might start a list of salient examples with John Bender and David Wellbery’s The Ends of Rhetoric. The volume launched with an incisive overview of the disruptions wrought by cognitive and creative constructions of subjectivity - from Bacon or Galileo to Kant or copyright law - against the classical hegemony of rhetoric over all forms of communication. At the same time, their collection argued for a modernist return or “repetition” (as opposed to mere residual continuities with older practices) of Nietzschean “rhetoricality”: a generalized, non-instrumental principle of groundless discursivity that manifests itself in fields as varied as philosophy of science, psychoanalysis, or literary criticism and linguistics. The end of rhetoric, by contrast, is a premise that extends and reconsiders arguments made by practitioners, opponents, even champions through all stages of the intellectual modernity to which the phrase is nowadays applied. And from the present vantage point there can be little doubt that the historic challenges to its utility and value were eventually matched by an enormous loss of leverage: in the arts and humanistic disciplines no less than in the sciences or moral thought. 2 1 Indeed Hegel thought that there was “a greater need in our day” for “philosophy of art” than there had been “in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction.” See Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 11. In a different spirit, Brian Vickers surveyed the long history of rhetoric, not excluding Plato’s fateful charge against conviction without knowledge, in an effort to recover its prestige for future scholarship - largely by urging the demands of continuity on tropological interests in structural linguistics, Hayden White’s metahistory, or De Manian deconstruction. David Wellbery has more recently returned to part of the terrain surveyed in The Ends of Rhetoric, and traced ways in which Romanticism worked to translate recognizably rhetorical configurations into the self-organizing features of subjective or poetic ends within themselves. Wellbery finds the endpoint of traditional rhetoric marked by its extensive transformation into self-recursive systems, whether in the notion of organic form or the self-legislating Kantian subject. No doubt the echoes of 2 John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 5. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 239 its classical authority might help to drive such epoch-making change, but Wellbery’s reflexive systems clearly break all ties with the notoriously instrumental purposes of rhetoric as an educational or disciplinary enterprise. The present essay studies a more closely circumscribed, domain-specific version of the afterlife of rhetoric. Compared to Wellbery’s transdisciplinary perspective, we will hardly be surprised to find more qualified, pragmatic adaptations in the effort, deep into the English-speaking nineteenth century, to teach a retooled rhetoric course in universities. It is nonetheless of more than antiquarian interest what motivates and, over roughly the duration of a century, then happens to the Scottish, eighteenth-century attachment between rhetoric and belles lettres (in itself a volatile and somewhat aspirational category for this curricular development). Scholars of classical and modern literatures have long acknowledged that there is a tangled history to how the literary field came to be studied in the modern university. Even a short list of internal elements and factors to this story would include the fate of post- Aristotelian poetics as a study, eighteenth-century aesthetics, philology, the historiography of literatures as cultural archives and, not least, the long decline of rhetoric in the anglophone academy. For now, this history is not especially well understood in its relations or significance, though it arguably forms an intellectual history of which even the heydays of cross-disciplinary theory have not simply freed us. It is just one of its unanswered questions how the efforts made by rhetoric in conjunction with belles lettres failed before departments framed themselves explicitly around the history and theory of literature. There have been efforts to define a range of eighteenth-century Scottish or dissenting reappraisals of vernacular communication skills as points of origin for twentieth-century literary studies. 3 3 See for instance Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992); and Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Yet this drawn-out episode forms merely one part in a larger puzzle of collective scholarly and pedagogical self-definition. We find the search for a new rhetoric moving successfully across sociolinguistic, institutional, or geographic boundaries. At the same time, the project yields discontinuities and failed ambition where the vindicatory historian hopes for institutional self-affirmation. In the following, I seek to trace its Scottish and American instantiations as an inductive venture to reform the workings of rhetorical instruction. It would be a more challenging endeavour to identify what aspects of that project may have contributed to its end. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 240 Defensive Rhetoric For all the staying power of rhetorically inflected teaching in the Scottish and American college curricula, the broader academic odds were clearly stacked against the overarching relevance of powers of invention, disposition, even eloquence within the modern university. At least three notable developments can help account for the technology’s pervasive frailty from the decades around 1600 to more recent testimony in the Romantic period. There are obviously wide differences between the motivations or the scope of cognitive empiricism, the relations between rhetoric and logic in the trivium, or Romantic transformations in poetics and aesthetics. Yet the regularities and sway of eloquence were equally opposed by anti-instrumental stances in the theory of art, the ceding of inventive powers to the dialectic method, or the ever-soaring quest for knowledge drawn from things, not words. Often these versions of communicative scepticism overlapped and, whether separately or jointly, drastically contracted the ongoing opportunities for work that valued rhetoric. The reasons for this adverse modern climate reach back far and wide, and by the time Scottish curricular reforms took stock, the disenchantment had become only too palpable. In the most fundamental terms, the shrinking base for rhetoric within the neo-classical encyclopaedia coincides with the emergence of empirical alternatives to text-based intellectual routines. Anthony Grafton once summed up a whole array of changing practices and methods by observing that “between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.” 4 The corresponding changes superseded continuities between, most simply, words and things, or between classical texts and the book of nature - a traditionally continuous horizon which Michel Foucault described suggestively as “a vast space requiring interpretation.” Foucault assigned the force of language in this previous integration of a textual “treasure” with the natural world to its ability to operate analogously as “the sign of things.” Things would, no less than words, present as signs, “to be discovered and then, little by little, made to speak.” 5 4 Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 1. Within this classical regime, what counted as a fact would have to resonate with textual authority, and observation had to make its case before a copious discursive heritage. It is not hard to locate crucial roles for rhetoric in this hermeneutic model of enquiry. All this changed when Grafton’s scholars came to look up, ever more attentively, from their traditional texts. What was at stake for rhetoric from then on was not just its curricular authority - as supported by scho- 5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), 33-4. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 241 lastic progress from the language arts to mathematics, or the humanist recombination of grammar and rhetoric with poetry, history, and moral philosophy. 6 Once the “primacy” of discourse, as Foucault described it, “went into abeyance,” the new paradigms of learning worked hard to control the ancient leverage of the language arts. A more far-reaching issue was its structural, encyclopaedic function as an engine of exchange and thought - all the more vulnerable for having been so classically self-evident. 7 Francis Bacon’s mighty “instauration” in the early 1600s pushed against the boundaries of learned discourse by reclaiming for the mind its native capabilities to “exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it.” 8 This ostensibly restorative attempt assailed the values of a textual tradition Bacon blamed for mere “perpetual agitation,” a debating culture that was piously or, by turns, fractiously “whirling about,” too often “ending” an enquiry just “where it began.” 9 When Bacon vowed that, in the face of such redundancies, a “way must be opened for the human understanding entirely different from any hitherto known,” that path toward the future could not draw on mere conviction or the well-turned argument, since both relied precisely on a set of general presumptions and established lines of thought. 10 Accordingly, Valerius Terminus recast the “true end, scope, or office of knowledge” in terms that challenged rhetoric and eloquence. It should henceforth be understood “to consist not in any plausible, delectable, reverend, or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before.” 11 To aid this more effective “commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things,” the Instauratio Magna pressed a more specific chastening of both inventio and elocutio. 12 6 On the humanist curriculum see, for instance, Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 113-14; and Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 12-13, 17-19, 36-41. Bacon anticipated that for future learning it would prove “not only useful, but absolutely necessary, that the excess of honour and admiration with which our existing stock of inventions is regarded be in the very entrance and threshold of the work, and that frankly and without 7 Foucault, Order, 43. 8 Francis Bacon, “The Great Instauration” (1620), The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, vol. 4 (London: Longmans, 1875), 13. 9 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 8. 10 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 13. 11 Francis Bacon, “Valerius Terminus,” The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, 1876), 233; quoted in Bender and Wellbery, 8. 12 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 7. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 242 circumlocution, stripped off.” 13 To guide future enquiry, this intellectual sobriety would sift mere wars of words from what had been securely understood. We need not overlook the mediating or explanatory tasks Baconian method left for rhetoric to note its forceful separation from the grounds of cognitive authority. 14 Where controversial “agitation” had been relative to one side or another of a spiralling, and thus itself largely immovable, debate, the force of Bacon’s project was to neutralize enquiry for a formal, and effectively collective, “mind of man.” 15 René Descartes’s groundwork towards the modern structures of philosophy and science mounted similar resistance to the sway of eloquence in organized enquiry. The Discourse on the Method opened by attributing persistent disagreements in the ambit of the sciences to a contingent cultural errancy rather than any differences between our native gifts of understanding. If both reason and the “power of judging well” were posited as “naturally equal in all men,” the obvious “diversity of our opinions” which the Discourse faced could have arisen “solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things.” 16 Such straying might of course be caused by different factors, but the posthumously published Rules for the Direction of the Mind identified especially pressing sources of distraction. As for Bacon, ancient texts remained important to the work of separating “what truths have already been discovered” from the “points which remain to be worked out in the various disciplines.” But their most conscious virtues also carried the “considerable danger that if we study these works too closely traces of their errors will infect us.” 17 Descartes worried that ancient eloquence would yield “the most subtle arguments” in a mere tactical “attempt to get us to adopt their point of view.” And even where authors had proved their timeless “luck to discover something certain and evident,” they would keep such philosophical truths eloquently “wrapped up in various obscurities, either because they fear that the simplicity of their argument may depreciate the importance of their finding, or because they begrudge us the plain truth.” 18 13 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 13. In the Discourse, Des- 14 For a sense of the range of different positions, see Brian Vickers, “Bacon and Rhetoric,” The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 200-31. Compare Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1956), 364-75. 15 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 8. Compare Paolo Rossi, “Bacon’s Idea of Science,” Peltonen, Companion to Bacon, 32. 16 René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method” (1637), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 111. Compare Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, 342-50. 17 René Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” The Philosophical Writings vol. 1, 13. 18 Descartes, “Rules,” 13. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 243 cartes’s speaker famously recounted his conversion from the misconceptions of an early education in the classical languages and disciplines. Even then, the powers of constructive self-expression evidenced “gifts of the mind rather than fruits of study.” At best, rhetoric had lost its dominant advantage if “those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible” were guaranteed to be “always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton and have never learned rhetoric.” 19 John Locke’s empiricist critique of human understanding offers a revealing index of the pressures brought to bear on rhetoric by decisive transformations in the sciences and natural philosophy. The history of science amply documents the calls throughout the 1600s for impartial intellectual clarity (with mathematics as a paradigm) joined with learning through “experience” of new particulars. From the earliest, the Cartesian turn worked to impugn the dignity of studied eloquence. 20 Book three of the Essay explored the “imperfection” and “abuse” of words to help improve our fragile efforts to communicate the “internal Conceptions” of the mind. Both run directly counter to a textual tradition that had come to look self-servingly contrarian and stale. Locke famously made language central to his reconstruction of the sensory formation of ideas, a fact that illustrates all the more clearly just how wide a gap between discovery and eloquence had opened up right at the centre of the philosophical enlightenment. 21 Locke listed numerous “unavoidable” 22 doubts and uncertainties in how, by “voluntary Imposition,” 23 arbitrary sounds may signify ideas. His list of “willful” or abusive faults (like empty jargon, inconsistency, naive essentialism, and so on) is just as long. 24 Their joint interference with the common good led Locke repeatedly to call for forms of hermeneutic modesty or (towards others) charity. 25 19 Descartes, “Discourse,” 114; quoted in Bender and Wellbery, “Rhetoricality,” 11. This linguistic scepticism clearly distanced all responsible communication from the effort to exploit, indeed to amplify, precisely the ability of language to manipulate our understanding. Classical persuasion looked effectively beyond the pale alongside pleas to join in damage limitation. Locke’s listing of avoidable misapprehensions saved his comments on concerted eloquence until the very end, just prior to his sketch of “remedies.” As separate aims, Locke damned the 20 For an overview see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 131-48. 21 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 402. 22 Locke, Essay, 476. 23 Locke, Essay, 405. 24 Locke, Essay, 409. 25 See, for instance, Locke, Essay, 489. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 244 “Pleasure and Delight” of figuration or “allusion” with faint praise - no doubt with sideways glances towards poetry. Yet outside their securely segregated forms, these must be forcefully detached from intellectual progress, in whichever modern form: if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetoric, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and Popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where Truth and Knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the Language or Person that makes use of them. (508) Such Lockean indignation had compelling echoes in the programmatic context of the early Royal Society. Even without the cultural resonance, however, of the paradigm of natural philosophy, Locke’s systematic Essay indicates the narrow ledge on which the status of rhetorical ability had come to rest. As if that loss of overarching status had not been enough, it was accompanied by long-term and more recent fractures in relations with the other language arts which might have otherwise empowered eloquence. Though distant chronologically, both logic and, towards Romanticism, an internalized poetics would yield added, and more closely localized, discouragement for a coherent eighteenth-century discipline of rhetoric. Timothy Reiss has probed deeply into early modern intellectual history to document the dissociation of language and wisdom, or specifically discovery, in its effect on the coherence of the trivium, and the increasing status of the mathematical, quadrivial arts. He traces the beginnings of hard questions about whether language could, in fact, “meaningfully furnish any path whatever to discovery” - not least in their divisive impact on the standard integration of a “triple propaedeutic of grammar, rhetoric, and logic/ dialectic” within which, “since Hellenistic and Latin antiquity, the tasks of these three arts, even when distinct”, had structurally “been cumulative.” For Reiss, as for much of the related scholarship, the sixteenth-century work of Peter Ramus and his ally Omer Talon typifies the pressures which these transformations brought to bear on rhetoric in its role alongside logic. As Ramus noted in attacking Cicero’s rhetorical authority, both rhetoric and logic claimed to teach discovery, or how to find and order arguments, as well as how to memorize and to communicate such thought. Faced with this ostensible redundancy Ramus, as Reiss describes his intervention, “became famous for cutting the Gordian knot of their similarities, placing inventio, dispositio, and The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 245 memoria under logic, elocutio and actio under rhetoric.” 26 Scholars have offered different assessments of this notable retrenchment of the scope of rhetoric to style - to tropes and figures - and to physical delivery. Peter Mack’s new survey of Renaissance rhetoric notes the influence of Ramism while also stressing that, in Ramist practice, rhetoric and logic were meant to be taught together, and hence to complete each other. Ramist pedagogy narrowed rhetoric to the promulgation of materials that were produced elsewhere, and validated under different protocols. 27 In an argument that led beyond the period context, Wilbur Howell’s previous studies understood Ramist reforms to have been central, not least in their contribution to the deep divisions between different kinds of rhetoric-writing that emerged over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 28 Howell described rhetoric as fracturing into Ciceronian revisionism, the elocutionary movement, and eventually the “new rhetoric” of Smith and Blair once Ramism had “threatened” its enduring loss of any real involvement in discovery or argument. 29 A last exhibit to help situate the craft’s uncertain modern bearings is provided by its fraught yet undeniably committed disaffiliation by Romantic manifestos in the theory of poetry and art. The classical and neo-classical relationship between the arts of rhetoric and poetics was in some ways variable, indeed uneven. There is little doubt, however, that their deep compatibility was mutually enabling. There was obvious overlap around questions of style, or tropes and figures. The most important interaction, though onesided, was of course that works of poetry were for the longest time considered and produced by individuals who learnt their qualifying eloquence It may be hard to settle the relationship between the overall uncoupling of enquiry and language and, in Ramist teaching, a more local differentiation of an art of eloquence and presentation. However, Howell’s insistence on the vulnerability of rhetoric is certainly borne out by Reiss’s finding of a newly dominant mathematical quadrivium or, outside the arts curriculum, by the fate of rhetoric in the history of empiricism and the rise of natural philosophy. 26 Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 2, 5. 27 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 142- 45, 163. 28 See Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), 24-6, 75-80; and his account of the original impact of Ramist rhetoric in Logic and Rhetoric, 146-81. For a brief overview of the appeal of Ramist rhetoric, not least in the North American context, see George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2 nd rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999), 249-52. 29 Howell, Eighteenth-Century Logic, 78. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 246 from rhetoric. 30 Ben Jonson’s Timber moves from Cicero and Quintilian to poetics by declaring, simply, that its objects constitute “the most prevailing Eloquence” and show, in that regard, “the most exalted Charact[er].” 31 In addition to expressive forms or ornaments, rhetoric could offer a default view of the workings of invention or arrangement. A work like Puttenham’s late sixteenth-century The Arte of English Poesie absorbed all three. 32 Conversely, Quintilian’s extensive treatment of the education of the orator assigned considerable importance to the student’s formative “digestion” of the poets. 33 It is all the more revealing to note just how readily Romantic arguments were able to repudiate deliberately crafted eloquence. Coleridge expressed a core assumption - long since axiomatic - that poetic language must defy all paraphrase (even within a given idiom) to gain its singular validity. Wellbery rightly finds Coleridge at odds with the positionality of elocutio (in relation to specific audiences, speakers, or occasions) when he defines as one of the “conditions and criteria of poetic style” that, “whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.” 34 30 I have relied on Thomas O. Sloane’s illuminating survey of these issues in his entry on “Rhetoric and Poetry” for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 1045-52. For additional material on the traditional relationship between rhetoric and poetry, see the first three essays in Wilbur Samuel Howell, Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic: Studies in the Basic Disciplines of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975); Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 145- 66; and Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 135-6. Wordsworth defied the force of “diction” as a fungible, generic resource all the more strictly in his foregrounding of a felt affect as the measure of poetic worth. Readers could not “be too often remind- 31 Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 633. 32 See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Contrived into three Bookes: The first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament (London: Richard Field, 1589). 33 Quintilian’s case for repeated and absorptive reading is at 10.1.19. The Institutio envisaged that boys who had just learnt to read and write be schooled by the grammar teacher in reading aloud and ennaratio (exegesis) of the poets. Poetic texts were to be “combed,” alongside every other “type of literature,” for “learned information” (or historiae) and “for words” (1.4.2-6; see 1.8 for additional details). The adult orator was to return to reading the poets (10.1.27-30) alongside historians, philosophers and orators as part of the joint exercise of reading, writing and speaking, designed to improve his eloquence beyond the “rules for Elocution, necessary as they are for theoretical knowledge” (10.1.1). See The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). Compare Curtius, European Literature, 436-8. 34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.J. Bate (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 1: 23. See Wellbery, “Transformation,” 185. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 247 ed” that poetry “is passion,” 35 that its genesis involved an “overflow of powerful feelings,” or its recollection. 36 Wordsworth thought of such experiences as both invaluable and elusive in the context of a stupefying cultural modernity, acting to “blunt” all active and “discriminating powers of the mind.” 37 Since the relevant poetic affect clearly could not - under such extensively disabling circumstances - be contrived at will, Wordsworth sought to conceive of his language as not made but found. It was a central plank of his “experiment” to see “how far” an existing language, say, of “conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted,” or would prove fortuitously suited, “to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” The inner workings of invention or expression this involved were clearly set against the broader cultural instruments that helped to numb the subject’s faculties. Wordsworth accordingly opposed the “natural delineation” of distinctly “human passions,” “characters,” or “incidents” to the sheer “gaudiness and inane phraseology” recirculated by uncritically “modern” authors. 38 His best-remembered testimony against “mechanical” stylistic tactics disavowed the lexicon “of what is usually called poetic diction.” With that turn against inherited stylistic resources, Wordsworth repelled a habitus of craftsmanship that took, he noted, “as much pains to avoid” as his rhetorically indebted counterparts would “ordinarily take to produce it.” 39 Though anti-rhetorical manoeuvres fuelled much theorizing in the period, Wordsworth’s resistance was unusually expansive. Not only were poets to derive new figurative powers from a culturally neglected, and emphatically untrained, discursive world of rural sociability. Critics and theorists were likewise to detach themselves from prized resources in engaging with a reconceived, experiential subjectivity in its distinctive realm. Wordsworth explained that he could not fully defend to a potential reader what had motivated his poetic practice, at least not without suggesting “the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him into an approbation of these particular Poems.” Poetic pleasure would resist such organized conviction - whether it be founded on a “systematic” effort to mount “arguments,” or on the mere persuasiveness of one’s “opinions.” 40 35 William Wordsworth, “Note to ‘The Thorn’ (1800),” in “Lyrical Ballads” and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), 351. In this definition of significant experience against both rhetoric and abstract ratio, Wordsworth echoes Kant, whose systematic mapping of our spheres of understanding diagnosed a compara- 36 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/ 1802),” The Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 126. 37 Wordsworth, “Preface,” 128. 38 “Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798),” in The Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 116. 39 Wordsworth, “Preface,” 130-1. 40 Wordsworth, “Preface,” 120. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 248 ble antipathy. The felt claim of reflective judgement - of the beautiful or the sublime - again defied conceptual argument. For its part, rhetoric might usurp the free play of the understanding and imagination which defined the genuine fine arts, and none more so than poetry. In that professional, oratorical capacity, however, Kant convicted rhetoric of multiple dishonesty. Its ulterior purposes ran counter to poetic self-sufficiency which, as mere “entertaining play,” worked “honestly and uprightly.” At the same time, its “deceiving by means of beautiful illusion” could have no lasting status either “in parliament or the pulpit.” Moving “people, like machines,” to judgements which would “lose all weight for them in calm reflection,” rhetoric for Kant betrayed enlightenment itself. 41 The New Rhetoric Their precarious textual transmission has conspired to give Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres an intriguing place within our understanding of the eighteenth-century Scottish efforts to remake rhetorically driven teaching in the arts curriculum. On his instructions, Smith’s executors destroyed the manuscript, along with other texts, of the course he taught for at least fifteen years, first in 1748 as public lectures in Edinburgh and then at Glasgow University from 1751. 42 Our text is a set of student notes, and while their modern editor makes a convincing case for their reliability, it seems likely that a carefully considered publication would have clarified both certain points of phrasing and Smith’s overall design. 43 As things stand, the Lectures offer a suggestive, if perhaps not fully detailed, view of a new educational venture. 44 Contemporaries recalled Smith’s lectures to have formed a course on “Rhetoric and the Belles Lettres.” 45 Our text emphatically describes them as “a system of Rhetorick” by analogy with their long line of famous predecessors. 46 41 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 204, 205. Smith also flagged, however, from the outset that his pedagogical 42 J.C. Bryce, “Introduction,” in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), 1. 43 Bryce, “Introduction,” 3-5. 44 On Smith’s place in the “new rhetoric”, see Howell’s standard account in Eighteenth- Century Logic, 536-76. Also see, more recently, Mark Salber Phillips, “Adam Smith, Belletrist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonsen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 57-78. 45 See Bryce, “Introduction,” 7-9. 46 Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), 27. I have retained original errors of spelling. Hereafter cited by page numbers in the text. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 249 intentions were at odds with the tradition - one in which “so many systems of retoric both ancient and modern were formed,” only to prove “generally a very silly set of Books and not at all instructive” (26). This complaint took concrete forms in Smith’s design, and helped to shape an educational prototype that looks - in hindsight and with our restricted textual evidence - at once invigorating for Smith’s auditors and openly unorthodox. For one thing, his lectures’ sense of their didactic purview is effectively confined to eloquence, or style. From Smith’s mid-eighteenth-century perspective, it may have looked obvious that neither the discovery nor the ordering processes involved in how his students ought to think could usefully be taught under the auspices of speech or composition. Inventio and dispositio were accordingly the primary components for his reconditioned “system” to discard. 47 Smith claimed to find “the least difficult matter,” “in every sort of eloquence,” to be manifestly the “choise of the arguments” as followed by their “proper arrangement.” He ascribed the same view even to Quintilian and Cicero who, like all subsequent “best Authors,” “never seem” to Smith “to be in ernest unless when” - with a predictable shift of attention - they give up on thought and revert back to “Stile,” exploring “ornaments of Language and Expression” (148). 48 These self-consciously linguistic features, Smith seemed to agree, were what most clearly invited “particular directions” and, in needing the “most skill,” could justify a separate rhetoric course. 49 At the same time, Smith’s previous lecture on “what is called the tropes and figures of speech” had, perhaps surprisingly, already cancelled out much of the substance formerly involved in teaching elocutio. Smith there blamed his Latin counterparts for crediting “all the beauties of language,” in their full experiential range, to misconceived manipulations of the tropes and figures. As if rhetoric could straightforwardly augment the “rules” of grammar (which the ancients rightly used to “regulate their language”), Greeks and Romans had persisted with this “old scheme” in their inability to understand the force of more creative or less regular expressive forms. Rather than attend to these “exceptions” - whose effects in fact could never be “reduced” (25) to rules - inveterate “Grammarians” (26) had hence codified the tropes and figures. In the process, they had reified a set of forms as if they might possess a separate, expressive agency. 47 Smith’s lectures did not separately focus on either memory or delivery. 48 Bryce supplies a misleading footnote in support of Smith’s remarks on Cicero and Quintilian. Institutio 3.3 offers a convenient account of the structural importance to both authors of invention and disposition. 49 Institutio 8.3 stressed the competitive appeal of eloquence by suggesting that, in his pursuit of “elegance and Ornament,” the orator sought “to recommend himself as well as his Cause” and - when compared with other branches of his art - fought “with weapons that are not only effective but polished and gleaming” (8.3.2). S TEFAN H. U HLIG 250 Smith explained, however, that the leverage of such less “common forms of speech” had to be bound up with the more integral nature of our efforts to communicate. It must be understood, in a holistic fashion, as “entirely derived from the expression they are placed in.” Figures “have no intrinsick worth” for Smith, and thus what registers as elegance or beauty must flow not from separable forms, but from a subject’s “sentiment,” or sense, and its accompanying “passion.” Smith argued, in fact, that an affective plain style could - prior to conventional ornamentation - convey “all that is passionate, tender and moving” or, conversely, what might be experienced as “noble” or “sublime” (25). It could moreover be effective in this way without having to draw on a distinctively linguistic expertise. All that was needed were communicative acts - at once semantic and affective - between sympathetic subjects: When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is possessed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it. It matters not the least whether the figures of speech are introduced or not. (25-6) What was primary for Smith was not stylistic eloquence, but a discursive and affective self-possession that would naturally express itself. In the absence of his unrecorded opening lecture, the existing Lectures start by commenting on “perspicuity of stile” (3). Yet Smith made clear throughout that such transparency is less a choice (as in, say, Cicero’s division into grand, middle, or low styles) than the default condition of discursive sociability. 50 Where rhetoric once helped a speaker think of what to say no less than how to frame that message most engagingly, Smith’s sympathetic subject came more fully formed to the discursive scene. Along with thought or intellectual arrangement, the propriety of what an author “is possessed of and intends” served to displace conventional eloquence. As if to conjure up a sort of inborn copyright, Smith stressed the fervid self-reliance of all true engagement with an audience of others, and not least across an interval of time. He ends a section on prose writers by remarking that “perfection of stile” lies, simply, in Expressing, in the most concise, proper and precise manner the thought of the author, and that in the manner which best conveys the sentiment, passion or affection with which it affects or he pretends it does affect him and which he designs to communicate to his reader. (55) 51 50 See Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1954), book 4. 51 Our text of Smith’s Lectures variously uses “sentiment” to describe both affective and semantic features of language. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 251 This insistence on discursive ownership left students with a range of choices: between different basic styles as well as the various kinds of practical, historical, didactic, or poetic composition which the Lectures go on to discuss. Once these were made, however, the authorial “manner” of the subject left no separate role for a technology of topics, tropes or figures. Smith went on to emphasize that this was nowhere more apparent than in the pervasive quest for “elegance” or beauty. It was here that the traditional orator was able to do most to prove himself, and to extol his art. 52 this Sentiment is nobler and more beautifull than such as are commonly met with, then your Language has all the Beauty it can have, and the figures of speech … can contribute towards it only so far as they happen to be just and naturall forms of Expressing that Sentiment. (26) What counts for Smith, however, is again primarily what his discursive subjects can claim to be proper to themselves. As long as language manifestly (or “perspicuously”) flows from “what you would express,” and the “affection” which “this matter inspires you with” (26), the aesthetic impact of a composition is above all else a function of what individuals can contribute. Only if There are suggestive parallels between Smith’s displacement of the bulk of previous rhetorical instruction and the Romantic advocacy of authentic affect. Wordsworth’s use of “passion,” for example, to oppose the promises of a poetic toolkit had quite comparable implications for poetic language. 53 For all their willingness to jettison most of the previously key components of the craft, the Lectures still aspired to the status of a “system” of discursive education. Smith relied on his account of affective and intellectual intent to help support linguistic competence across the full range of occasions in the different genres, disciplines, or institutional contexts. At the same time, the comparison with more exhaustive moves to naturalize creative practices (through poetry as passion, say, or systematically in Kant’s account of art as genius) may help to clarify a challenge for Smith’s project. If the primacy of sentiment or affect could displace so much of what once constituted the technology of rhetoric, what could Smith hope to teach his students? His account of sympathetic discourse between subjects who, ostensibly, say or write simply what comes naturally (to vary Stanley Fish’s more recent pragmatist injunction) raises a real risk of paradox. What Smith defined as the propriety of a discursive effort contrasts sharply, as he frequently reminds us, with Yet unlike Romantic efforts to recast poetics or aesthetic judgement, Smith’s curriculum had no intention to restrict itself to principally pleasurable or imaginative forms. 52 Compare Institutio 8.3 as cited in n. 49. 53 Compare James Engell, “The New Rhetoric and Romantic Poetics,” Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, ed. Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 217-32. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 252 existing strategies of thinking, ordering or eloquence - with what we might have thought a rhetoric course would teach. The Lectures’ central way of coping with this difficulty is to shift their weight from rules or precepts (so beloved by Smith’s grammarians) to teaching by example. Smith opened, as we saw, with an account of self-expression and communication, and his early lectures placed a corresponding stress on the formation and the idiomatic workings of a range of different languages including, in some greater detail, English. 54 Smith began his survey of exemplary forms by mounting “character”, i.e. the proper or authorial style, of contemporary writers like Shaftesbury, Swift or Addison against the merely technological, and hence impersonal, force of conventional craft (40, 55). He then dedicated the remaining lectures to a more or less detailed account of the available discursive options: the old kinds of oratory (demonstrative, deliberative, forensic) were thus joined by descriptive discourse, historiography and poetry, as well as the more recent species of didactic or especially scientific presentation. At least in the notes we have, these “accounts” are often less remarkable for substance than for how they teach, that is for their didactic function within Smith’s design. Nothwithstanding his misgivings against the idolatry of figurative language, Smith provided “a few observations” (27) on selected tropes and figures, most suggestively on the expressive force of metaphor (29-31). Both the substance and the intellectual fulcrum of his teaching lay, however, in exposés of a series of stylistic options which he offered much as if they constituted natural kinds. 55 The detailed articulation of this rhetoric of example had to wait until one of Smith’s students wrote up his own Edinburgh course which, after starting it in 1759, he had taught first as a rhetoric professor and then as the inaugural chair of rhetoric and belles lettres. The Lectures worked hard to disrupt a structure of impersonal, abstracted rules that might impose themselves on interactive subjects. Smith taught instead from a prospectus of existing kinds and authors, and no doubt looked to his students to extend the learning process. What his Lectures offered them was some exposure to the paradigms of style, and Smith provided some account of how students might think about and read authors like Clarendon, Swift or Addison in their distinctive styles and genres. 56 54 Smith noted that there was “nowhere more use made of figures than in the lowest and most vulgar conversation. The Billingsgate language is full of it.” (34) Once they were published twenty-four years later, Hugh Blair’s Lectures proved - to judge by its dissemination outside Scotland and well into the next century - perhaps the most successful 55 Mark Phillips has stressed the interest of Smith’s discussion of historiographical discourse. 56 See Robert Morell Schmitz, Hugh Blair (Morningside Heights, NY: King’s Crown Press, 1948), 61-63; and Bryce, “Introduction,” 8. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 253 modern textbook in the literary field. It represents at once the aspirations and, when all was said and done, the failure of the Scottish effort to shift rhetoric teaching from perennial rules to learning by example and, especially in Blair’s hands, to a culture of imaginative reading. Like his old professor, Blair rejected teaching in the “arts of speech and writing” that would compensate the loss of order and discovery to logic (and to natural philosophy) by aggrandizing the skills of eloquence: a “sort of art” that could not but seem “ostentatious and deceitful” now, that would involve “the minute and trifling study of words alone; the pomp of expression; the studied fallacies of rhetoric; ornament substituted in the room of use.” 57 Blair defined as broadly as he could the field of intellectual and discursive competence at which he aimed. His introductory address extolled “lights mutually communicated” as opposed to merely “solitary” ponderings (1). Blair’s explicit broadening of his focus to include receptive skills produced so large a purview that we might describe it as a practical philosophy of language. “Whether,” Blair sketched out, “Perspicuity” proved once again the single “fundamental quality” (185) of style for any genre, discipline or context. In a text that constantly looks for the common ground, Blair’s fervent opening commitment was to institute didactic “principles of reason and good sense” to occupy “the place of artificial and scholastic rhetoric” (3) - a site that clearly looked abandoned to the pedagogy of the late enlightenment. the influence of the speaker, or the entertainment of the hearer, be consulted; whether utility or pleasure be the principal aim in view, we are prompted, by the strongest motives, to study how we may communicate our thoughts to one another with most advantage. (1-2) To negotiate these axes between pleasure, knowledge, and belief, Blair claimed an equal stake in regular cognition and the realm of taste. On the one hand, he recalled long-standing hopes that a “true rhetoric and sound logic” might remain “nearly allied” (6-7). On the other, his substantive first four lectures were concerned entirely with matters of aesthetics (taste, genius, criticism, beauty, and sublimity). That it would prove “no less essential to man to have some discernment of beauty, than it is to possess the attributes of reason and of speech” (17) was a contention resting both on recent theory and on Blair’s sense of the civic relevance of such a claim to “manners of the present age” (7). At least since Addison, the eighteenth century had explored how “principles of Taste” could, one way or the other, be conceived as 57 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), ed. Harold F. Harding, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965), 3. Hereafter cited by page numbers in the text. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 254 “deeply founded in the human mind” (17). 58 How could Blair hope to teach discursive competence within this openended field, now complicated by his argument for the embedded mental leverage of taste? There was a forceful sense of novelty and pedagogical ambition in his move to preface his more recognizably rhetorical discussions with a set of lectures on key terms - “currently employed,” as Blair complained, “without distinct ideas annexed to them” (36). These took his students through a digest (without much originality) of commonsensically empiricist views (roughly, say, from Addison to Burke, Johnson or Hume). As we have noted, genius and taste, criticism, beauty, and sublimity were clarified at length, with markedly more space devoted to receptive than productive categories. Blair then began a more familiar treatment, at least for a Smithian disciple, of linguistic origins and evolution, the development of writing, general grammar, sentence structure, and the grounds of figurative language. In all, Blair ran through fourteen lectures before, in the structure of his course, the question of explicit teaching, rules or precepts could present itself with any force. By then, there had been every indication that - within the large horizon he had mapped out for the art of discourse - there was not much that could in any straightforward sense be taught. As if in parallel, Blair noted an evolving social obligation that indeed would give the exercise of taste a role in all self-conscious discourse. Having “become refined,” the “public ear” would at present “not easily bear what is slovenly and incorrect.” “Every author must,” in any field, accordingly “aspire to some merit in expression, as well as in sentiment, if he would not incur the danger of being neglected and despised” (7). Blair’s Lectures reproduced some of the key assumptions which had helped Smith to attenuate the rule-bound structure of traditional rhetoric. The reciprocity between specific styles and classic authors was a commonplace. 59 58 Blair signalled the modernity of “taste considered as a power or faculty of the mind” in noting that “much less is to be found” on the subject “among the antient, than among the modern rhetorical and critical writers” (17). Yet Blair raised new doubts about composition as a craft when he insisted that “the best” way to define style lay not in the regularities that might “relate to it” but in “an author’s way of thinking.” He referred his students back to principles of judgement (like taste “founded” in the mind) by describing style as “a picture” of “ideas which rise in” a specific subject’s “mind, and of the manner in which they rise there” (183). Blair showed the same revisionary edge - though also with a similar lack of expressiveness - in ending a protracted tussle between, on the one hand, the “advantage” of “method and rule,” “in every art” and, on the other, the explicit postulate that our discursive powers are intrinsically “founded in nature” (276). If the 59 The saying “the style is the man” is commonly associated with the Comte de Buffon. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 255 “sentiment of passion” which, again, “lies under the figured expression” is “in truth” what “gives it any merit” (277), Blair was right to emphasize that even in the realm of language arts, “all science” necessarily “arises from observations on practice” (276). Much of this experimental learning - based, predictably, on the superior practices of textual examples - might need to extend beyond the lecture hall. Blair followed up another nod to “mere rhetorical rules” (which his Lectures signally failed to enjoin) by granting, rather strikingly, that “supposing natural genius to be favourable, more by a great deal” of improvement in communicative practice “will depend upon private application and study, than upon any system of instruction that is capable of being communicated” (6). So what could his Lectures hope to do? As we have noted, Blair frontloaded an extended treatment of key concepts in aesthetics, though his stance on even the most central points remained so evenhanded as to obfuscate this innovative feature of his course. What followed was, much as in Smith, a demonstration or an illustrative overview of paradigms drawn from the different branches of oratory or written composition. As Blair himself previewed his course, First, some introductory dissertations on the nature of taste, and upon the sources of its pleasures. Secondly, the consideration of language: Thirdly, of style: Fourthly, of eloquence properly so called, or public speaking in its different kinds. Lastly a critical examination of the most distinguished species of composition, both in prose and verse. (14) Among more recent authors, Milton, Francis Atterbury, Swift, and Addison took pride of place. Blair’s most extensive criticism was devoted, paragraph by paragraph, to four Spectator essays, chosen from the very sequence on the pleasures of the imagination that had contributed much to his aesthetic dissertations (not a fact, remarkably, noted by Blair). After their conceptual preparation, Blair’s descriptive survey of the “kinds” or “species” which a student might encounter moved the burden of his teaching solidly towards a rhetoric of example. Blair’s prolegomena sought to reframe the work of discourse around taste, and a related lexicon of basic judgement. His review of compositional types aimed to encourage a heuristic discourse that might equally aid those who read, write, or speak publically. Neither approach to rhetoric teaches much by way of craft. And whereas emphases on teaching by example rather than by precept have a long and varied history, 60 60 Seneca’s “the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful if one follows patterns [exempla]” is often cited in this context. See Epistles 1-65, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1917), 26-7. the new rhetoric’s effort to erect a system of exemplary, experiential learning throws up questions for Blair’s rigorous empiricism. Without theory (or indeed rules), how do we S TEFAN H. U HLIG 256 know what makes a text exemplary, and what do texts exemplify? If we are to examine one, or to compare it to another, how do we come by criteria or guidelines for that exercise? Blair’s theoretical preliminaries were no doubt meant to fill that gap. Yet in practice these do little more than set out their agreement with his rhetoric of example. Blair was most explicit about how his students ought to learn from textual “facts” or “observations” in his “natural account” of “criticism” - in itself one of the terms as yet “without distinct ideas annexed to them,” and hence in urgent need of reconstruction. What was to define it was the gradual emergence of more general, accumulated insights from particular experience that was, to start with, free from rule-bound prejudice. The basic task was “to distinguish what is beautiful and what is faulty” in an individual “performance,” and thus “from particular instances to ascend to general principles; and so to form rules or conclusions concerning the several kinds of beauty in works of Genius” (36). It should accordingly be clear that what might count as “rules of Criticism” could not - as a technical or craft-tradition might suggest - be formed by any induction, à priori, as it is called; that is, they are not formed by a train of abstract reasoning, independent of facts and observations. Criticism is an art founded wholly on experience; on the observation of such beauties as have come nearest to the standard which I before established: that is, of such beauties as have been found to please mankind most generally. (36-7) This process was to operate both for a long-term sense of canonicity and for the individual, who would require such a “standard” to identify what might be “beautiful” or “faulty” in the first place. David Hume had previously explored the risks of circularity involved in this empiricist account of judgement. 61 Blair’s stress on the crucial role that “private application” was to play for his didactic goals reflects the overall degree to which his Lectures shift the educational responsibility of rhetoric to reception. By establishing a role for criticism that would parallel expressive skills, Blair moved in equal parts away from the supremacy of composition (be it vocal or in writing) and from principally classroom-based criteria of success. His introductory lecture openly considered “what advantages” might be expected to accrue to those, In his effort to replace “scholastic rhetoric” with a forward-looking course, Blair based his Lectures on the prospect that a student’s wellsupported, but also subjectivized “experience” would over time translate into discursive competence. We should recall that this ambition was to hold not just for poetry and oratory, but for the universal sphere of mutual enlightenment. 61 See David Hume, “Essay of the Standard of Taste” (1757), Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 226-49. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 257 “as there are many,” who had “no such objects as either composition or public speaking in view” (8). They ought to, for one thing, reap the full rewards of what was now, emphatically, a “study of discourse” (3; my emphasis). It was simply that, To them, rhetoric is not so much a practical art as a speculative science; and the same instructions which assist others in composing, will assist them in judging of, and relishing, the beauties of composition. Whatever enables genius to execute well, will enable taste to criticise justly. (8) What I am suggesting is in part that these tenses - that the contrast between “will enable” and “enables” - may well matter to Blair’s mirror-imaging of critical and compositional abilities. Preceptive teaching might look to the course itself, and to the classroom setting, for its practical success. By contrast Blair signalled that - even at their propaedeutic level - the exemplary, and hence experiential features of his teaching would look to the longer term. Especially those with “speculative” interests, as he previously put it, might seek “only to improve their taste” in order “to acquire principles” which would, in time, “enable them to judge for themselves in that part of literature called the Belles Lettres” (3-4). In the end, this more extended time horizon was a function of Blair’s central emphasis on taste, and on its “deeply founded” (17) operation in the mind. If the rhetoric of example could lead students to “reflect” self-consciously upon “the operations of the imagination,” this might, in due course, “increase our acquaintance with some of the most refined feelings which belong to our frame” (10). No wonder that Blair recommended “private application and study” alongside whatever teaching might be more immediately “communicated.” At its centre, Blair’s discursive training hinged on students” self-improvement through their powers of judgement. With that gamble on the longer term, his Lectures were in a distinctive sense designed to undergo the test of time. Mobility and Stasis The new Scottish rhetoric was designed as a departure. It sought to remake the craft of composition as a subject for the future: one that would explore the patterns, regularities, and even faculties involved in sociable communication. As a practical and elementary philosophy of language, the new rhetoric was from the start involved with questions of mobility that characterized the socio-linguistic - and hence cultural and economic - opportunities of students at the Scottish universities. When the poet John Home campaigned for the establishment of a new rhetoric chair for Adam Ferguson in 1756, he made it clear that “Eloquence in the Art of speaking” would be “more necessary for a Scotchman than any body else as he lies under some disadvantages S TEFAN H. U HLIG 258 which Art must remove.” 62 As the textbook version of the Scottish effort to transform what rhetoric might teach, Blair’s Lectures proved exceptionally mobile and, so far as we can tell, effective in a range of different educational contexts - and for a protracted period of time. They were translated promptly into several European languages, but a more striking index of Blair’s long-term resonance lies in the sheer number of English editions, printings, and abridgements, both in Britain and in North America. This special resonance of education for relatively marginal participants in British culture was confirmed by Smith, who noted the complexities that enter into “the idea we form of a good stile” once such conceptions operate at cultural or geographic distances. “We in this country,” Smith conceded to his students, “are most of us very sensible that the perfection of language is very different from that we commonly speak in” (42). The Scottish rhetoric was in part meant to negotiate such differences. There was, moreover, a more literal sense in which it bridged the distances between contrasting sociocultural contexts. 63 Following the 1783 edition, which looked back on more than twenty years of active lecturing and was issued simultaneously in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin, there were at least ten full-length editions by 1800, and at least twenty-seven by the middle of the nineteenth century. Of these, at least fifteen appeared in North America (not counting various abridgements). 64 In the nineteenth-century Scottish universities, curricular reforms soon tended to displace courses like Blair’s with teaching that would concentrate on logic, moral philosophy, or more basic forms of composition teaching (of the kind that still continues for remedial purposes at university level). 65 By contrast, the evolving landscape of American collegiate education proved consistently receptive to the project of which Blair was the chief export. Even before the Lectures were printed at Philadelphia in 1784, the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University) ordered the original from England. There is ample evidence that Blair supplied the single most consistently used arts textbook in the period from independence to the Civil War. 66 62 Quoted from Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), 108. If we combine curricular and bibliographic evidence, we may well ask how many 63 The first German, Italian, and French editions appeared respectively in Leipzig (1785- 86), Parma (1801-02), and Geneva (1808). 64 For a partial list of editions, see Schmitz, Hugh Blair, 144-5. 65 See Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the Cultural Provinces (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997), 262-7. 66 See Franklin E. Court, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2001), 14-15; and Warren Guthrie, “The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America, 1635-1850: III. Domination of the English Rhetorics,” Speech Monographs, 15 (1948): 61-2. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 259 other works of literary theory or education have, outside the classical tradition, seen a comparable degree of cultural dissemination. Yet alongside this remarkable capacity to circulate for many decades and across a broad contextual domain, it is equally striking to observe the ways in which the Scottish rhetoric stagnated - not least since its stasis and mobility would coincide. It is not just in Scotland that the project failed to find continuous adopters, or to translate into modern disciplinary forms. Its North American success was similarly marked by an extensive cultural presence, indeed prominence, combined with a persistent lack of intellectual influence. Of the three major rhetoric courses that were crafted in the period, and have survived, only John Witherspoon’s early Princeton lectures share Blair’s interest in “taste, and criticism” (or his faible for “preliminary discourses”). 67 In works like Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric, a traditional perspective on the role of rhetoric alongside logic sought to reconcile the rifts which philosophical critique had introduced into the language arts by separating adult eloquence from intellectual discovery. 68 Other than Whately, the two textbooks to compete with Blair both disassembled ways of thinking about language which the Scottish rhetoric had sought to merge. Without help from taste or criticism, George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric sought to reconstruct a modern sense of eloquence that would include validity and evidence as part of its appeal. Campbell’s text had been a prominent alternative to Smith’s and Blair’s endeavours long before it met with institutional success. 69 67 John Witherspoon, “Lectures on Eloquence,” Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Miller (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990), 231, 233. The two other texts are John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810); and Edward T. Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856). The last alternative to Blair, another Scottish legacy, decoupled criticism from all practical concern with composition. Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames, was entirely reception-oriented, and provided college students 68 Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric: Comprising an Analysis of the Laws of Moral Evidence, with Rules for Argumentative Composition and Elocution, ed. Douglas Ehninger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010). Whately’s textbook was first published in Dublin in 1828, and became an instant success in the American colleges. See Guthrie, “Development,” 65; and Albert R. Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900, intr. John T. Gage (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1990), 53-4. 69 George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1963). First drafted in the 1750s, Campbell’s Philosophy appeared in 1776, and became popular in the 1820s. See Howell, Eighteenth-Century Logic, 577-612; Guthrie, “Development,” 63; and Kitzhaber, Rhetoric, 52-3. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 260 with a copious digest of what early-eighteenth-century aesthetic theory had had to say about the workings of the different fine arts. 70 How, then, should we think about this correlation of an extraordinary distribution, via Blair, for Scottish rhetoric and belles lettres with the project’s failure to inspire any concrete adaptation or development in the academy? By the later nineteenth century, all institutional initiative in Britain and in the United States fed into the establishment of literature departments, whose supporting paradigm of scholarship fused literary historiography with philological prowess. 71 Accounts of the distinctiveness and separation of the spheres of modern cultural activity, like that produced by Jürgen Habermas, have often pointed to Kant’s three Critiques as the high watermark of a modernity in which science and philosophy, art or aesthetics, and law or moral thought develop on quite different tracks. For all their drive to educate the judgement for enlightened sociability, the spread of Blair’s ideas had by then led to little more than their dispersal. Obviously the failure, just like the success, of such a disciplinary development is likely to have been overdetermined. We may find a starting point, however, in Blair’s aim to improve the total range of future discourse and communication with a rhetoric anchored in capacities of taste. Blair largely sidestepped precepts in his effort to engage his students with demonstrative examples. His large-scale pedagogical attempt to show, not tell, installed the individual learning experience as an important measure of success. This may have been a hard act to pull off in an increasingly divided modern landscape of communication and research. 72 70 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). On the collegiate use of Kames, see Louis Franklin Snow, The College Curriculum in the United States (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1907), 122, 125; and Court, Scottish Connection, 43-50, 151-2. In view of such specific and self-differentiating forms of discourse, Blair’s effort to derive both communication and enlightenment from the first principles of taste might lead us to compare his propaedeutic work with Schiller’s theoretical construction of aesthetic education as a comprehensively redemptive force. The task which both would face - whether belatedly or with intent - would be to overcome the deep divisions of modernity through an emphatically non-disciplinary, holistic mode of education. What the contrast with Schiller’s idealist proposals may point up is not only how unprepared Blair’s elementary faith in a discursive sociability looks within an increasingly divergent world of modern disciplines. It serves moreover to remind us that the Scottish rhetoric of example left itself wide 71 See, for instance, Miller, Formation, 255-67. For arguments that claim a lasting legacy for Blair in modern literary studies, contrast Court, Institutionalizing; and Crawford, Scottish Invention. 72 See for instance Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), esp. 1-2, 206-10. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 261 open to heuristic failure. Blair did much to overcome scholastic precepts, but the readers he empowered may have let him down. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 262 Works Cited Adams, John Quincy. Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University, 2 vols. Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810. Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon. Eds. James Spedding. Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. London: Longmans, 1861-79. Bender, John, and David E. Wellbery. 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Social and Individual Mobility: Travels in the 19 th Century M ARSHALL B ROWN Austen’s Immobility Die Kunst ist - im Verhältnis zum Leben - immer ein Trotzdem; das Formschaffen ist die tiefste Bestätigung des Daseins der Dissonanz, die zu denken ist. 1 In today’s academic world mobility is primarily a term of sociologists. They have used it copiously to refer to migration and the flow of migrant groups. Labor and dispossession are the principal referents. But in common parlance mobility has many additional associations. As other essays in this collection illustrate, mobility can imply liberation as well as constraint; it can pertain to individuals as well as to groups; it can concern internal change constituted by maturity and development as well as transport and external setting. While the diverse versions of mobility obviously share certain broad characteristics in that they all refer to changes of position or state, they can appear incompatible in terms of affect and scale. What do migrant laborers have to do with limber actors or genre-bending authors? Building and Bildung may not seem a natural pair, especially not to the cement workers. My aim in this essay, on the example of Jane Austen, is to suggest nevertheless that the various forms and degrees of mobility are more alike than they initially sound. Freedom and compulsion, transport (in all its senses) and binding, growth and decay cannot be neatly separated. While Austen does not herself activate all imaginable resonances of mobility, her novels are a good test case to illustrate the complexities and mutual involvement of different spheres and types of mobility. Movement and change affect us all, and they are never simple. Austen serves the inquiry because her social goal is stability, not mobility. The ideal is permanence: marital bliss, social order, domestication and domesticity. Any alteration threatens disruption; estates may be improved but only within carefully regulated limits of taste. Class boundaries are universally recognized and firmly in place. Life goes on in organic fashion; there is commerce but no manufacturing, nor even so much as a bakery to transform raw materials in a public setting. Travel is coded so that, for instance, men are far freer to move than women, 2 1 Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), 62. though any impulsive movement bodes 2 Abundantly informative, Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency in England (London: Routledge, 1994), 155-162, distinguishes women’s immobility from men’s much greater freedom. Yet when it comes to travel (large-scale mobility), money and the control of money are major factors, for instance governing whether and when Fanny M ARSHALL B ROWN 268 ill; even exercise is prescribed and regulated. It can appear as if anything readily classified as mobility, that is, any actual change of condition, puts the social fabric at risk. To that extent, Austen does seem to group all forms of mobility under a single aspect. Indeed, the larger the movement, the more threatening it appears, and the less account Austen’s narrations take of it, remaining attached to the women who stay at home or are chaperoned to established resorts. At first sight, then, mobility is only a problem, merely a deficient mode of fixity, without an opening onto possibility. Yet Austen’s world is, of course, far from as moribund as this description makes it sound. Even though there certainly are characters who remain chained to the center, staid, listless, or morbid, still no one would pretend that gravity is Austen’s mode. Her aim is to enable life, not to stifle it. Immobility becomes the regulator of motion, not its antagonist. For that reason, her novels are a privileged vehicle for examining and parsing divergent vectors of mobility. It is true that there are no migrant groups in Austen’s world, not even the Irish, despite some reference to people moving to Ireland. Her closest approach comes in the brief encounter with gypsies in Emma. But those gypsies are surely internal vagrants and not international migrants. To be sure, there may be peripheral awareness of migrations, as when Fanny Price in Mansfield Park reports asking her father about the slave trade, a topic about which Austen had recently read a book. 3 But, Fanny reports, her inquiry led only to “such dead silence! ” 4 Price gets to go horse-riding. Even though none of Austen’s characters belong to the lower classes, the expense of travel often weighs on them. For better or worse, Austen’s world is too settled to speak directly to issues of population flows. Not for her the invading Romans and the traveling students of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Hamlet, nor the patterns of in and out migration portrayed in Defoe’s account of the Kreuznaer/ Crusoe family. Nothing so global colors Austen’s world. Her colorlessness has been fruitfully scrutinized by postcolonial critics as a conscious or unconscious colorblindness, the repression of the larger historical 3 William Galperin discusses Austen’s reading of Charles W. Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire as well as Claudius Buchanan’s Christian Researches in Asia in The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003), 163-66. A letter to her brother Frank of July 5, 1813, reports her consulting the map of Sweden, evidently fantasizing about foreign lands, since a subsequent letter of Sept. 25, 1813, expresses her disillusionment at the conditions Frank reported in the interval: Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 214-15, 229. 4 Austen’s novels will be cited by giving chapter; page, using the abbreviations in the list of Works cited; so, here MP 21; 199. The original editions, followed by Chapman, begin the numbering afresh with each volume. Most modern reprints number them consecutively, and I have adopted the consecutive numbering, since it can be readily reconstructed from editions that number them by volume. Austen’s Immobility 269 forces impacting her society. 5 Yet people have always moved. Today’s news might give the impression of a new crisis from across the sea in Europe and across the river in the United States. But Völkerwanderung has always been the norm and stability the often longed-for exception. Even the arch-structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss regarded his analyses as demonstrations of “innumerable mixings of races and cultures occurring throughout the ages.” But whatever the authorial dimensions of the repression, Austen’s characters’ “dead silence! ” appears to rest on an ineluctable lack of interest. Not even Wentworth in Persuasion is asked what he was doing in all his years abroad. 6 “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire.” Those are the opening words of Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion (1; 3). Person is identified with place, place with house, house with family. “Hall” characterizes the And mobility of a lesser sort permeates even Austen’s world. Austen’s characters do move. She herself didn’t ever move far, and neither do her narratives. But her letters are full of comings and goings - essential to her lively spirit and far too many to be easily readable by anyone not actually living among her acquaintances. Issues of individual mobility are central to her fiction as well: geographical mobility, social mobility, economic mobility. Two consequences follow from acknowledging the mobility in Austen’s seemingly static world. The first is that the tensions surrounding mobility can be felt on a far smaller scale than that of the nation. For Austen, moving to the next village can be as disruptive as traveling across the seas: “a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea” (P 6; 42). Between Kellynch and Uppercross lies what might punningly be called a customs barrier, for duties back then were far more local than they are now. Even if Austen’s ideal is a completely stable domesticity, it must take note of flux. And I mean “if.” That ideal is not a foregone conclusion. For my second thesis is that the domestic ideal is cultural, not natural, and is anxious, not comforting. Civilization’s discontents are as endemic to Austen’s world as to Freud’s or to ours. These are the issues I propose to scrutinize, with the ultimate goal of opening the question, what light problems of individual movement shed on those of social flows. 5 The marquee postcolonial critique of Austen is Edward Said’s essay, “Jane Austen and Empire,” Culture and Empire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 80-96. He raises important issues, but not in the right way. “The Bertrams could not have been possible without the slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class” (94) is a tautology if referring to a particular case, but false as a generalization: Austen’s works contain numerous wealthy landowners such as George Knightley with no colonial connections. For an articulate critique of Said (one of many), see Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 805- 21. 6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1973), 437. M ARSHALL B ROWN 270 building as a seat, hence as a long-term abode. People below the nobility are no longer named for their village or town as they were in the Middle Ages, but the important houses in Austen’s world are all named and bear the imprint of their owners. People without a residence are looked down upon; they are children, servants, or paupers. Quite commonly, the residence replaces the person, as with the domicile of the haughty Mrs. Churchill in Emma: “Enscombe however was gracious, gracious in fact, if not in word” (E 30; 257). The house can even take on its owner’s gender: “Enscombe, I believe, certainly must not be judged by general rules: she is so very unreasonable; and every thing gives way to her” (E 14; 123, Austen’s italics). Every man’s house is his castle; homesteads are little kingdoms, and the families are its subjects. So much is clearly the case with Enscombe, for “Mrs. Churchill rules at Enscombe” (E 14; 121). But though Enscombe seems a distant kingdom which the novel’s characters may never reach, the sense of dominion appears in all of Austen’s true domiciles. In Fanny Price’s family at Portsmouth, where no one rules, there is disorder, instability, and loss of identity. In Bath, where everyone is a lodger, there is opportunity and risk, at great expense. These are not homes. Your place is where you belong; it is your society, your character. Sir Walter is a metonym for Kellynch, Kellynch for Somersetshire, and, we must presume, Somersetshire for England. The epitome of domesticity is the epitome of the nation, as evoked in the often quoted prospect from George Knightley’s estate onto Robert Martin’s Abbey Mill Farm, with its display of “English verdure, English culture, English comfort” (E 42; 360). The analogy between home and country is a strong one, so strong that George Knightley seems to exile himself when he agrees to move down the road to take up residence with his wife Emma. The name Woodhouse is eloquent, and telling for the entire ideology of domesticity: she yearns for the house that would be a native home. The domestic ideal was, of course, widespread. It permeates Wordsworth’s poetry, among others; I single him out because of the threat of disruption that haunts all his poetry. “Vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods” populate the area above Tintern Abbey; they could be political refugees, but they seem primordial when juxtaposed to “some hermit’s cave.” And “pastoral farms, green to the very door” rest uneasily, not just in Austen’s bounded world of improvement, but even in Wordsworth’s more open universe, where the “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild” 7 7 William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford UP, 1974). smack of adolescent excess and where “thoughts of more deep seclusion” forebode death. Domesticity needs a fence to keep out the green and a threshold from the wind and the rain. It shuns too much exposure; even the hermit in his cave keeps a protective fire burning in the forest of the night. And yet, however wide- Austen’s Immobility 271 spread the ideal of a bounded existence, it was certainly never universal; notably, the hospitality that characterized Walter Scott and so many of the inhabitants of his novels reflects a different world-view that bridges divides and welcomes migration. The ideal of settlement that pervades Austen’s fiction was anything but inevitable. The question to be posed, then, is whether domesticity appears as a natural ideal, as an ethical choice, or as a social pathology. In settling your terrain, in improving your lot, are you honoring the human condition or dishonoring your neighbors and associates? How much regulation and of what sort establishes a custom and a community, and when does it lead to estrangement? What does it take to keep a home or even a castle from degrading into a fortress? Sir Walter Elliot might here represent the nadir of domesticity. Right on that first page of Persuasion comes the information that his favorite reading is his family history in the Baronetage. Skipping back over “the endless creations of the last century” he comes to his own ancient patent. The living and the dead consort here in a tribute to self-absorbed sterility. “The Sir Walter Elliot who united [beauty with rank] was the constant object of his [own] warmest respect and admiration” (P 1; 3-4). The result of narcissistic domesticity is obstinate celibacy; his deceased wife’s “strong attachment” links him with Lady Russell (P 1; 5), but he resists bringing her into his home as his wife. Sir Walter is married to his house and can imagine no other partner, hence no equal human companionship. His life’s great tragedy, enforced by his wasteful habits, is the necessity of letting out his estate. His consolation is that the tenant is a worthy admiral. “An admiral speaks his own consequence, and, at the same time, can never make a baronet look small” (P 3; 24). Behind this stated preference lies an unstated presupposition. As the novel’s final lines make clear, admirals belong to the larger world and are subject to removal. He can’t make a baronet look small not just because of his rank, but also because his occupation means that he can never permanently settle. He does not threaten Sir Walter’s enclosure. Sir Walter, to be sure, is the beginning of the story, not its end. Better homes and gardens are in view. Austen’s novels all end with marriages looking forward to new settlement. Bad or absent fathers are replaced with good husbands, enabling continuity that overcomes the passing of generations. Yet while deaths are muted in Austen’s novels, they are often present in the background. So, in Emma, Emma has lost her mother too long ago to remember her; Jane Fairfax is an orphan; Frank Churchill was brought up by a foolish stepmother; Harriet Smith’s parents are unknown. Trauma is ubiquitous even if unstressed: in Persuasion the Baronetage gives the day when Sir Walter’s son was stillborn—but not the day of his wife’s death, which he pens in, but then never thinks of her again. (There are quite a few other early deaths M ARSHALL B ROWN 272 in the background of Persuasion: William Elliott, Lady Russell, and Anne’s crippled and impoverished school friend Mrs. Smith are all widowed, and Benwick has lost his fiancée Fanny Harville.) Instead, his thoughts are given to the future; he also pens in the day of his youngest daughter’s wedding, and then thinks constantly of succession and inheritance. Chains broken and repaired are the substance of Austen’s novels, and a happy and stable marriage is their goal. The conclusion of Persuasion calls Anne Elliot’s happy lot a “settled life” (P 24; 251), and five of the six novels use the word perfection to characterize the final outcome. “To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, is to do pretty well” is, for instance, the narrator’s judgment at the end of Northanger Abbey (NA 31; 252), and only Pride and Prejudice lacks the word “perfect” - not surprisingly, given the totally dysfunctional character of the Bennet family and the anger of Darcy’s aunt. The yearning for settlement may initially be compromised by the deficiencies of the older generation, but it appears requited by the virtues of the young. Yet even for them settlement is never perfect. To be sure, Anne Elliot finally gets her captain, and with him enough money to compensate for the family wealth her father has squandered, but she gets neither land nor security: there is “no Uppercross-hall before her, no landed estate, no headship of a family,” and she must live with the “tax of quick alarm” and perhaps even “the dread of future war” (P 24; 250, 252). All Austen’s heroines survive unsettled periods and sometimes agonizing uncertainties before the double rewards of domestic and financial settlement. It’s no wonder that the happy ends so precariously realized come to seem perfection incarnate. But as Andrew Miller’s study of Victorian perfectionism has shown, the white glare of perfection is not easy to live with. 8 8 Andrew Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008), 123-41. This chapter, on Austen, is titled “Perfectly Helpless.” As joyous as Austen’s endings sound, the narrator’s say-so does not make them perfect. For like much else in Austen’s narratives, the narrator’s judgments in the conclusions are shaded by benevolent tact. How perfect can perfection be? The word “perfect,” in Austen’s usage, is often ironic and even more often euphemistic; it reflects desire more than decree, as when Jane Bennet, struggling to think positively about her eloped sister Lydia, assures Elizabeth that she is “perfectly well” (PP 47; 286). And, really, moments of perfection are as much as can ever be imagined. “Verweile doch, du bist so schön”: Faust’s dangerous wish might well be Austen’s too. But to make that association is also to recognize that she must also echo his “doch.” Contentment is a dam against the floods of time. Here is Franco Moretti’s comment on the happy end of the novels of realism: “Why, in other words, did Western civilization discard such a perfect narrative mechanism? And perhaps the answer lies precisely Austen’s Immobility 273 here: it was too perfect. It could only be convincing in so far as historical experience continued to make absolute cohesion and totalizing harmony not only a desirable ideal, but a conceivable one too.” 9 The ideal threatens to unravel at the end of Persuasion. Anne Elliot, Austen says, “gloried in being a sailor’s wife,” but the condition also brings anxiety for her husband’s “profession which [though], if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance” brings with it the “tax of quick alarm” and perhaps even “the dread of future war” as “all that could dim her sunshine” (P 24; 252). For in fact military tours of duty were long and dangerous. Here the longed-for parallelism of home and country takes its toll: peaceable virtue at home accompanies perilous valor abroad. To this novel, at least, the dictum of Lukács applies that I quoted as my epigraph. Form confirms dissonance. But doesn’t it always? You can project an idyll, as Austen’s conclusions all do. But you can’t expand it to the whole country or to the continuing future. Time is always passing in Austen’s worlds, with each chapter succeeding to the moment of the preceding chapter, each one bringing a new encounter and a new risk. None of the novels offers a prospect into future family life, no next generation foretold, no happily ever after formula. The perfection that is achieved as a moment of stability, that is, does not foreclose future adventures. The joyous conclusion of a troubled courtship says “trotzdem” and puts only the most momentary stop to change. Life will have more chapters, and with it more worried fathers, more poor relations, more quarrelsome children, more financial anxieties. There are in fact few genuinely happy couples described inside Austen’s narratives, and perhaps only one marriage that takes place during the span of a novel brings happiness within the plot, that of Harriet Taylor and Mr. Weston. And even that marriage both portends trouble to Mr. Woodhouse and remains shadowed by the tensions around Weston’s son Frank Churchill. (There are of course some foolishly happy marriages, such as John and Fanny Ferrars or William Collins and Charlotte Lucas.) The plots stop at the end of the novels, but there is every reason to believe that life will go on. The early work of D.A. Miller represents one tendency in Austen criticism that regards closure as “expedient repression.” If one disregards the possible irony in Austen’s use of the word “perfection,” then the novels project domesticity as a conceivable ideal - but even then conceivable only as an ideal, not as a settled possession. 10 9 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 72, Moretti’s italics. That is perhaps too harsh a view of the 10 D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 267. This book speaks of “a fascinated delight with unsettled states of deferral and ambiguity” manifested in “a blinded dialectic, knowing itself only in the partial mode of denial” (66). More recently, Miller has awarded more credit to the author for “a dialectical reminder not just of that excluded self it [Style] M ARSHALL B ROWN 274 closures she really imagines, if one regards them as inevitably temporary. But the suppression of mobility would be an unwelcome repression. Indeed, as Nicholas Dames has written, “mobility is central to Austen.” 11 According to Patrick Brantlinger, writing about Austen’s genre, national expansion and domestic settlement were always in conflict. He reads the dream of Empire as an escape, and it could be, though, as the end of Persuasion shows, the pull goes in both directions, and home could equally well be an escape from imperial adventure. Here is what Brantlinger says: Imperialism influenced not only the tradition of the adventure tale but the tradition of “serious” domestic realism as well. Adventure and domesticity, romance and realism, are the seemingly opposite poles of a single system of discourse, the literary equivalents of imperial domination abroad and liberal reform at home. In the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from scenes of domestic conflict. 12 Everything Brantlinger says there is true, except for the qualifiers “most unlikely” and “shadowy.” For in fact, as I have been suggesting all along, settlement and movement are inseparable twins. It might not be foreign adventure, but adventure there must always be. The ending that is too perfect puts a stop to movement and to life. 13 had to give up, but also of that included self it never had, ... what we might properly call its ego ideal.” Perfection is the name of that ideal which, on this account, the novel exposes to inspection: in Emma “the perfection of Style ... opens the secret of its impossible desire to possess the perfection of a Person who has, who is, everything.” D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 67-8. Adventure and domesticity are incompati- 11 Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 65. Dames’s rich chapter (20-75) covers much the same ground as the present essay, and some of our examples overlap. His focus, however, remains on memory rather than on movement, leaving the issues worth retracing in the present context. I am grateful to Kevis Goodman for pointing me to this study. 12 Patrick Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988), 12. 13 D.A. Miller’s Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), which buys into the notion that Austen’s “ideology is one of settlement” (50), asserts that while time doesn’t stop at the ends of her novels, it “lapses into benign repetition” (44). In fact, though, no oracle could know what the future might have thought to hold for characters who exist only in the mind of an author who closes the curtains on her dramas. Only two of the novels end with a prospect, and in one, Pride and Prejudice, the rhetoric of repetition clearly screens many potential disruptions. Lydia and Wickham’s “manner of living ... was unsettled in the extreme. They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation.” Georgiana’s “mind received knowledge, which had never before fallen in her way” (PP 61; 387). Are these instances of repetition or of change? Lady Catherine’s “resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself; and Austen’s Immobility 275 ble only in their ideal forms; what is unlikely is not situations in which they coexist but those in which they don’t. There is value in movement; Wentworth’s name suggests as much. Yet Wentworth’s perfect gallantry betrays his name by proving an enemy to liberty, for he shocks his brother-in-law Admiral Croft by denying women freedom of movement. This is from no want of gallantry towards them. It is rather from feeling how impossible it is, with all one’s efforts, and all one’s sacrifices, to make the accommodations on board such as women ought to have. There can be no want of gallantry, admiral, in rating the claims of women to every personal comfort high - and this is what I do. I hate to hear of women on board, or to see them on board; and no ship, under my command, shall ever convey a family of ladies any where, if I can help it (P 8; 68-9). Wentworth’s refusal to allow women this kind of mobility is mildly hysterical. If you rate women so high that your narrator has to italicize “high,” then you will refuse them the discomforts of travel - and its comforts as well. Wentworth has to learn better than that. The Empire is not a shadowy realm; it is a distant part of the globe. The Empire looks shadowy in Austen’s novels because it is hard to reach. But in evaluating the role of mobility in her works it is essential to remember the difficulties of travel. In Pride and Prejudice the wealthy Darcy tries to reassure Emma that 50 miles is “a very easy distance,” but the less wealthy Elizabeth thinks quite otherwise (PP 32; 178). And in Emma, though London is “only sixteen miles off” from Highbury, it is not only “beyond [Emma’s] daily reach,” but “much beyond” (E 1; 7). In the terms of this novel, at least, sixteen miles is a voyage. On a fast horse you could do it in a few hours, as Frank Churchill does, purportedly for a haircut, shocking all concerned. In a wheeled vehicle it would take half a day. According to the memoir of Austen’s life by her nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh, “The smaller landed proprietors [...] seldom went farther from home than their country town,” and in 1771, when the family changed residences, “the lane between Deane and Steventon [...] was a mere cart track, so cut up by deep ruts as to be impassible for a light carriage. Mrs. Austen [...] performed the short journey on a featherbed.” 14 she condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received” (PP 61; 388). “Or” is a delicate reminder of unsettled feelings, and one senses the risk that condescension in spite of pollution could readily revert to spite at the pollution. Such a road launches the unfinished Sanditon: “A Gentleman & Lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex Coast which lies between Hastings & E. Bourne, being induced by Business to quit the high road, & attempt a very rough Lane, were overturned in toiling up it’s long 14 J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, in Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 177-78. M ARSHALL B ROWN 276 ascent half rock, half sand” (MW 1; 363-64). By one recent calculation, the cost of the cheapest public transportation was roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxicab today. 15 From the perspective of Austen’s novels, it is too restrictive to regard mobility only or chiefly in terms of the long-range movement of populations or of dispossessed groups, only in terms of those forced to move or those who seek advantage by entering new cultural regions. Her works are a reminder that movement is both natural to all humans and difficult for all. It is true that she nowhere portrays the mechanicals and servants who are the subjects of Patricia Fumerton’s recent book about internal migrations, entitled Unsettled. For that reason, you can come away from reading Austen with the impression that the real life has been left out. Anything even remotely approximating the condition of migrants as usually understood is repressed or ironized by Austen’s immobile ideal. The closest she comes to representing work actually being done is George Knightley reviewing his books and directing the manager of his estate: as Emma says in the concluding moment of volume 2, Knightley is away a lot (presumably on business, though she doesn’t actually say that), and “when he is at home, is either reading to himself or settling his accounts” (E 36; 312). Real work is presumably done at Abbey Mill Farm, but the farm appears only in the idealized perspective I have quoted, when “safely viewed” over a wall (E 42; 360). Improvement is aesthetic, not economic: relandscaping has provided Sotherton in Mansfield Park with nothing more genuine than a “ha-ha” for a boundary and a “wilderness” that was really a “planted wood of about two acres” (MP 9; 91), and Sixteen-mile cab rides each way are not daily fare for very many of us, let alone half-day jolting rides on uneven roads and in uncertain weather for the cost of cab fare. In the face of that uncomfortable reality, there is actually a surprising amount of travel in Austen’s novels. Emma’s Highbury is particularly confined and stagnant; Emma has not been to Knightley’s neighboring estate of Donwell in two years, and she has never made the seven-mile excursion to Box Hill. But that is extreme, and oppressive, and even Emma frets to get out and to get her depressed father to bestir himself. In other novels people come and go frequently to London, to Bath, to the coast, and further afield as well, at home and also abroad. The Empire is in fact not a shadowy realm for Sir Thomas Bertram. It is indeed far away, but within epistolary reach, and he returns faster and sooner than the young people caught up in their theatricals wish. He goes there on business, family business. It has to be a matter of importance to call him so far away, but setting sail is a normal demand or opportunity, into which he inducts his eldest son. And no one expresses any particular curiosity about his experiences when he returns. Like Ireland, the colonial realm is arduous and remote, but still part of the business of life. 15 Robert D. Hume, “Money in Jane Austen,” forthcoming in Review of English Studies. Austen’s Immobility 277 equally bogus is the interior remodeling for the theatricals, which Sir Thomas immediately undoes with a little more carpentry. (Christopher Jackson, the carpenter, may be the only named skilled laborer in Austen’s corpus, but even he is a household employee, not an independent craftsman.) Economic life is a fantasy or a delusion. Nor are the lower classes more fully represented: the disorderly Price household, while déclassé, is a far cry from Dickens’s Micawbers and Jellybys; the impoverished Bateses are not like any of Dickens’s genuine indigents; and the three brief paragraphs devoted to a crowd of begging gypsy children make no pretense to depicting the criminal underworld. These limitations of Austen’s world are, of course, well known. But they should not blind us to her sensitivities. The displacements her characters undertake or undergo are not of the same magnitude as those experienced by migrants in today’s world. But then the entire scale of her universe is different. The disruptions that beset the prosperous, often very wealthy denizens of Austen’s villages are decidedly tamer than those suffered by many before, during, and after her time. Mobility does not threaten livelihood to nearly the same extent. But it is different in degree, not in psychology. Families are disrupted, reputations compromised, situations threatened in Austen, as they are throughout many kinds of communities. Change in locality, in economic circumstances, in opportunity, in age, and, obviously, in domestic situation are the core of her novels. As Moretti argued, the entry into the world is the essence of the Bildungsroman, from Goethe and Austen forward; he recognizes openness to opportunity as an essential element but does not attend to the essential correlative, which is displacement. Whatever Austen’s last chapters bring, the itineraries are full of the anxieties of the unknown. The unsatisfactory poles of response are embodied in an exchange at the end of the Sotherton outing. Fanny expresses the passivity that has rendered her a victim of circumstance and misguided influence: “I shall soon be rested [...]; to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.” And Mary Crawford expresses the agitated impulsiveness that renders her morally unfit for contentment: “I must move [...], resting fatigues me.” And the end of the chapter then soon brings a foreboding quiescence that links immobility with mortality: “Fanny said she was rested, and would have moved too, but this was not suffered [...] She watched them till they turned the corner, and listened till all sound of them had ceased” (MP 9; 96). The tensions surrounding mobility percolate through Sense and Sensibility, a novel full of comings and goings. Neither motion nor stasis fills the bill. The Miss Dashwoods had now been rather more than two months in town, and Marianne’s impatience to be gone increased every day. She sighed for the air, the liberty, the quiet of the country; and fancied that if any place could give her ease, Barton must do it. Elinor was hardly less anxious than herself for their removal, and only so much less bent on its being effected immediately, as that she was con- M ARSHALL B ROWN 278 scious of the difficulties of so long a journey, which Marianne could not be brought to acknowledge (SS 39; 279). The ideal is open-air calm, stability with liberty. Traveling is difficult and expensive, fixation is disheartening. As ever, the good-natured Mrs. Jennings expresses things more animatedly than propriety really allows, but she speaks for all the characters in her reaction to the sisters’ departure: “Lord! we shall sit and gape at one another as dull as two cats” (SS 39; 280). But the characters hardly go outdoors, and the atmosphere is oppressive almost everywhere. Those who make moves are selfish opportunists, on the make, libertines. The poles governing this world are thus paralysis and inconstancy, with inconstancy the more viciously immoral of the two. The double-bind exists throughout Austen’s fictions. It is resolved here only by “an extraordinary fate” in the final chapter (SS 50; 378), an unrepeatable series of miracles that replace the poles with their attenuated forms of stable sense and mobile sensibility. But to reach a happy conclusion these title forms must be further attenuated until they become near doublets, with Elinor learning to feel with others (in the scene of Willoughby’s confession) and Marianne learning to think. Sensibility converts into sensitivity: “her conscience, her sensitive conscience,” Marianne’s mother says about her, in the novel’s only use of that adjective (SS 47; 350). Bildung would be the ideal form of mobility, but Brandon, at age thirty-six, has exhibited only immovable, almost inexplicable constancy, and Marianne, at nineteen, is already becoming a matron. “Though sisters,” the last sentence says, “they could live without disagreement among themselves” (SS 50; 380). The upshot in this happiest of conclusions is a “constant enjoyment” (SS 50; 378), obliterating differences and consolidating steady states in both the virtuous couples and the wicked ones. The best Austen can imagine is a cheerful immobility. One great achievement of Austen’s art lies in the coalescence of scales. The corporeal, the psychological, the social, and the ethical characteristically coincide, as do the local and the wide-ranging. Each element allegorizes the others. So, for instance, Mary Favret writes eloquently about the unsettling end of Persuasion that “the structures of feeling demanded by war [...] migrate into everyday life.” 16 16 Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), 171. For that reason, even the smallest of movements in her works reflects on the basic conditions of human mobility. Too much motion results in Lydia Bennet’s flirtatious inconstancy; too little in Mr. Woodhouse’s lethargy. But in a changing world, there can be no sweet spot that is always paced correctly. Rather, Austen’s marriages reflect the ongoing adjustment needed to keep the polity in balance. As the gayest of the novels, Pride and Prejudice tends toward both the virtues and the risks of mobility. Elizabeth’s innate impatience is tested to the limit in the long chapter at Austen’s Immobility 279 Pemberley, which begins with her “spirits [...] in a high flutter,” continues by admiring “every remarkable spot and point of view” until “the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House” (PP 43; 245), followed by a tour of the grounds in which she outpaces the Gardiners, whose “progress was slow” (PP 43; 254). But though quicker to notice, Elizabeth is less observant, for in the next chapter the watchful Gardiners perceive Darcy’s love for her. By nature an eager and “excellent walker,” as Miss Bingley scornfully observes (PP 8; 35), Elizabeth later proves a faster runner than Jane as well (PP 49; 301). The only person she can’t outwalk is Wickham: “she had walked fast to get rid of him,” but it doesn’t work (PP 52; 329). But the “flutter of spirits” (PP 52; 326) is clearly not the healthiest condition, and she needs the counterweight of Darcy’s deliberateness to keep her in check, just as (according to the Gardiners) he needs “a little more liveliness” to bring out his virtues (PP 52; 325). These themes, which persist throughout the novels in ever-changing balance, reflect the sensibility responsive to movement while resistant to agitation. On some accounts of Austen, movement is concentrated on inner development, the “passage into self-knowledge.” 17 But development requires both exposure and alertness, or, as Miranda Burgess has described it, transport in the sense of movement without an excess of emotional transport. 18 Settlement is undoubtedly the goal of Austen’s narratives. The fortunate in her world are those who persist and struggle through to a stable outcome. But stability characterizes only the one last chapter out of fifty or sixty. In Emma the outcome is particularly regressive, with an older husband brought under the roof of the aged father. It might seem excessive to speak of a death wish here, but noise is never happy in Austen’s world, and the blessed event is something that might well be called a quietus. The goal of desire is the end of desire; that is the insight that led Leo Bersani to take Mansfield Park as a key instance of the linkage of realism with the fear of desire. 19 17 Susan Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 151. But even a 18 Miranda Burgess, “Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling,” Studies in Romanticism, 49 (2010): 234-35. 19 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 74-77, making the point that too much acting creates a world of imagination and disrupts reality: “the power of stillness is often equivalent to the power of description” (77). In a parallel discussion from a historicist rather than a theoretical and psychoanalytic perspective, Linda M. Austin, “Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism,” ELH 74 (2007): 629-53, discusses 19th-century critiques of the superficial “tourist gaze.” According to a fine critical analysis of Mansfield Park by David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 72-90, the only true escape from inauthentic acting would come not from settlement but utter disappearance, as instanced by the status of the narrator who (almost) never says “I.” M ARSHALL B ROWN 280 gayer novel, Sense and Sensibility, ends with Marianne Dashwood “submitting to new attachments” and with a spate of double negatives that vividly evoke the compromises that settlement entails. Willoughby “found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity,” Margaret (the third sister) is “not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover,” and Elinor and Marianne “could live without disagreement between themselves” (SS 50; 379-80). It is a killjoy, Bingley’s sister Mrs. Hurst, who says about the already too placid Jane, “I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet [...], and I wish with all my heart she were well settled” (PP 8; 36). Excessive, indeed. Perfection, as here, is ever near allied to denial. Immobility is destiny or fate, bliss or curse, quiescence or denial and destruction. Either way, it is the end of the fable. But there have always been births and deaths, lovers and rivals, quarrelsome siblings and envious spinsters, glorious careers at risk and boring evenings at cards. Always have been and always will be. Austen’s narrative endings have fairy-tale underpinnings; their ethereal tone implies that reality must be less perfect. And in that world, the world of all chapters but the last, people are always on the move, whether walking a half-mile in the rain on a charity expedition, journeying to London for dissipation, Bath for encounter, or a provincial city for escape or opportunity, or voyaging abroad. Fielding’s Tom Jones and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss both introduce the proverbial migrants, gypsies, as sentimental ideals. In Emma they make too brief an appearance to legitimate any evaluation; there is no sentimentality to the episode, merely an acknowledgment that such things exist, even in Highbury’s never-never-land. But that is, in fact, a fundamental insight of Austen’s fiction. Except for the briefest, idyllic states of exception, we are all migrants through life. The mobility we see in others, with the kind of exaggerated alarm that they arouse when the gypsy boys assail Harriet Smith, really is the situation of all of us. Migrants are not others; neither noble savages nor ignoble ones. They are ourselves. A notable recent study of mobility, Tim Cresswell’s On the Move, prompts a response in the light of Austen’s portrayals. Cresswell’s book is a rich and varied, historically aware and broadly interdisciplinary account of mobility on many scales from the dance-floor and the horse-barn to labor flows. It is resourcefully argued and rewarding to read. Cresswell divides the world into sedentarists and nomadists. As a characterization of cultural anthropology, his division is persuasive. Those who respond favorably to settlement are troubled by mobility; those who seek free movement resist disciplining in place. There is no doubt where his own sympathies lie: mobility, for him, “is a social and cultural resource,” and “the emergent nomadic metaphysics” is characteristic “of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” 20 20 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 220. In- Austen’s Immobility 281 deed, he sees his books as “an account of the production of mobilities in modernity” (83). He avoids the trap of simple class reifications, and he acknowledges a left sedentarism that he associates with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. Nevertheless, his account remains too insistently axiological. Whichever side one’s metaphysics favor looks good or normal, and the other side bad or defective. No place is recognized for dialectic where the axiological and ontological poles must be balanced against one another. That is where Austen’s contribution lies. She does not deny axiology, but she plays axiology off against ontology, or, in simpler language, ideal value against real existence. The result is the dialectic missing from Cresswell’s basically descriptive accounts. Like Cresswell, she sees flux on many scales, from the dance floor and horse cart to the global. To grope one’s way toward settlement in a world in flux is one view of the task. How does one successfully decide to make a commitment that calls a halt to the flux? What kinds of commitments fail, what kinds succeed? At the same time, Austen recognizes how essential it is that one’s commitments not be life-destroying. Halting must never be equated with blockage. The ideal of perfection is inevitably fragile. In the post-lapsarian world fixedness is no more the answer than rootlessness. So, in a different but entirely pertinent context, Ottmar Ette has newly written about the illusion of returning to a paradise (such as Robert Martin's farm that shimmers beyond the ha-ha): “Migration back to the starting point always proves … to be migration to an Otherwhere, to a place that is no longer what it once was that can only be insofar as it is coming to be.“ 21 21 Ottmar Ette, Konvivenz, Literatur und Leben nach dem Paradies (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012), 55, my translation: “Die Migration zum Ausgangspunkt zurück erweist sich stets ... als Migration an einen Andernort, an einen Ort, der nicht mehr ist, was er einst war - der nur sein kann, weil er werden wird. “ Rigid elders and flighty adolescents, patriarchy and elopement, are equally unsatisfactory. So long as we can see Austen’s endings as provisional rather than definitive, we can find in her novels an accommodation of space with time, old with young, national stability with global opportunity, domestic contentment with progressive husbandry. Nomadism and identity politics both have their attractions and their value, for sure. But we need art’s “trotzdem”; we need models like Austen’s to keep any single value from getting out of hand. M ARSHALL B ROWN 282 Works Cited Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960. E. ---. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. ---. Mansfield Park. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960. MP. ---. Minor Works. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958. ---. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1948. NA, P. ---. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1959. PP. ---. Persuasion. Ed. D. W. Harding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. ---. 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P HILIPP E RCHINGER Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing in Victorian Writing This essay revolves around a terminological distinction - adopted from Tim Ingold - between ‘transport’ and ‘wayfaring,’ 1 the thematic reverberations of which I shall pursue through a number of interrelated Victorian concerns, ranging from epistemology and natural history to the sensation novel and the railway. Arguably, all of these concerns may be drawn out of a dynamic field - one that was intensely researched around 1850 - on which chemistry met with physics and physiology. This interdisciplinary meeting ground was seen to be constituted through a continuous conversion of kinetic energy or (as it was then called) ‘living force’ into heat and heat into living force. And what was taken to initiate and perpetuate this process was the persistent pull of gravitation, the mutual attraction, and concomitant repulsion, of material bodies capable of moving through space. “Indeed the phenomena of nature,” as James Prescott Joule summarises this view in a lecture on matter, living force, and heat (1847), “whether mechanical, chemical, or vital consist almost entirely in a continual conversion of attraction through space, living force and heat into one another.” 2 On Joule’s account, this “continual conversion” means not only that “the phenomena of nature” are caught up in an endless process of variation and reconfiguration, but also - and just as importantly - “that order is maintained in the universe,” as he proceeds to emphasise: “nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost, but the entire machinery, complicated as it is, works smoothly and harmoniously.” 3 1 Tim Ingold, “Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge,” Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 149-152 and passim; Tim Ingold, “Stories against Classification: Transport, Wayfaring and the Integration of Knowledge,” Being Alive 156-164. So, on the one hand, the world is conceived as forever in transition, kept alive (so to speak) by means of an ongoing exchange of energy variously translating mass into motion and motion back into different arrangements of mass. But on the other hand, it is still regarded as wellbalanced and well-proportioned, held in place by an equilibrium of forces which ensures that “nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost,” the whole ma- 2 James P. Joule: “On Matter, Living Force, and Heat,” The Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule (London: Taylor and Francis, 1884), 273. 3 Joule, “On Matter” 273. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 286 chinery working smoothly and harmoniously. “And though, as in the awful vision of Ezekiel, ‘wheel may be in the middle of wheel,’ and every thing may appear complicated and involved in the apparent confusion and intricacy of an almost endless variety of causes, effects, conversions, and arrangements, yet is the most perfect regularity preserved.” 4 Yet, while this may provide a reassuring conception of the universe, it is contingent on a cosmological view which clearly privileges the limited structure of a predefined space over the unlimited possibilities of an indefinite extension in time, ruling out the disquieting prospect of unpredictable future motions in favour of the belief in a preordained design. More precisely, Joule’s argument - also known as the first law of thermodynamics - is premised on the supposition that the logic of energy conversion can be fully captured in terms of a functional equation, that is, in mathematical terms. 5 One might therefore say - using Ingold’s distinction - that the exchange of energy is here conceived as a mode of transport rather than wayfaring, which is to say that it is not regarded as an activity of developing along lines, but as an operation of carrying across. According to this equation, every expense of kinetic force is exactly matched by a corresponding production of heat which may, in due course, be reconverted into the same amount of kinetic force, so that the total measure of energy always remains the same. But this argument can only work on the assumption that the space of conversion, or the space in which the conversion of one form into another takes place, excludes the time that is required to constitute this space in the first place. Indeed, in Joule, the succession of time is implicitly reduced to a stable pattern that already exists, preordaining the way all processes of conversion materialise or unfold. Time, on this account, can therefore not function as a medium of innovation, opening up new pathways and possibilities by creating or unleashing energies that do not yet exist. It can only work as an instrument of conservation, mechanically executing or reaffirming an economy of relations that has been mapped out in advance. 6 4 Joule, “On Matter” 273. This has further implications, for there is a crucial difference between these two modes of movement, as Ingold explains: The object (or subject) of transport remains unaffected by the process of travelling from one location to another, its destination having been determined from the start, whereas the object of wayfaring is worked out in 5 The field of Victorian energy physics and its relation to fiction and poetry has been comparatively neglected by scholars of literature and culture. For a good introduction to this theme, including further reading, see Allen MacDuffie, “Victorian Thermodynamics and the Novel: Problems and Prospects,” Literature Compass 8.4 (2011): 206-213 and Barri J. Gold, “Energy, Ecology, and Victorian Fiction,” Literature Compass 9.2 (2012): 213-224. 6 Ingold, “Against Space” 150. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 287 response to what occurs on a path that only opens up in the process of moving itself. When “in transport,” Ingold writes, “the traveller does not himself move. Rather he is moved, becoming a passenger in his own body, if not in some vessel that can extend or replace the body’s powers of propulsion.” 7 The time of transport, that is to say, is regulated and controlled by a definite space, preconfigured according to a schema of dots and directions that reduces the totality of possible relations to a limited grid of rational connections. Time in transport, one might say, is time spent in confinement, locked up inside a definite compartment that is sealed off from whatever may take place on the outside. In this imprisoned mode, time is no more than an unavoidable function of space, necessarily to be endured in anticipation of a station that waits at the end. When time is put at the service of destinationbound transport, it must therefore either be killed or forgotten or at least passed as quickly as possible, which may explain (by the way) why the most cherished notion of an ideology of transport is speed. The time of wayfaring, by contrast, cannot be captured inside a spatial grid that is already measured and laid down in a definite form. In the mode of wayfaring, time rather opens up spaces of its own, as it takes shape along a line - not necessarily a straight one - “that advances from the tip,” to quote Ingold again, “in an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal.” 8 I. Epistemology Consequently, the space of wayfaring does not exist outside of and apart from the processes and practices through which it is given form and meaning in time. Rather, this space continually impinges on the traveller, motivating her to move out of her vessel in order to engage with the environment sustaining her on her course. The time of wayfaring, in short, leaves room for swerves, turns, roundabout ways and the possibility of surprising encounters emerging from unmapped places that have not been registered in advance, whereas the time of transport is dominated by abstract figures, numbers, plans, schedules and stationary coordinates, constraining all journeys from the start. My purpose in drawing on this distinction is to bring out that the time of thermodynamics, as implied in Joule’s theory, is still conceived as an enclosed time of transport, restricted to the function of carrying energy across from one self-contained point to another. Time, that is to say, is a vehicle of maintaining a pre-programmed system, rather than of engendering incalculable disturbances in the architecture of powers, out if which, in the long run, a new order may arise. This concept of time is not only tied up with an ideal- 7 Ingold, “Against Space” 150. 8 Ingold, “Against Space” 150. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 288 ist world-view, holding that there are a number of absolute, sensetranscendent structures of the mind - typically represented by the axioms of mathematics and geometry - corresponding to laws of nature which are independent from the often confusing and contradictory information picked up by the senses. The same concept of time also - and concomitantly - functions as the main pillar of what one might call an epistemology of transport, according to which true knowledge is acquired by transferring particular phenomena ‘upwards’ into a stable general framework interpreting, elucidating and classifying these phenomena. True justified knowledge, on this transport-based conception, is the destination of a temporal process which is not regarded as an integral part of this knowledge, but as a subsidiary pathway leading there. Consequently, the time that it takes to work out a true and valid theory is not regarded as a time of wayfaring or line-making, during which the conceptual boundaries of an object are continuously drawn and redrawn in relation to the changing environments in and through which this object takes shape. It is rather regarded as a time of transport, necessarily to be spent in relocating any object from a context of discovery into a context of justification, but leaving the substance of this object unchanged. In this manner, for example, the Kantian William Whewell - whose work propounds this epistemology of transport in an exemplary way - conceives induction, or the collecting of general truths from particular facts, as a process of translating sensual data into ideal schemata which colligate and explicate these data, thus converting “their apparent confusion into order, their seeming chance into certainty, their perplexing variety into simplicity.” 9 The act of induction, on this account, makes sense of experience by interpreting it in terms of a theorem which is not itself built up from experience, but passed down from the mind. “Thus in each inference made by induction there is introduced some general conception, which is given not by the phenomena, but by the mind.” In other words: “We take a standard, and measure the facts by it; and this standard is constructed by us, not offered by Nature.” 10 Or yet again: “The particular facts are not merely brought together, but there is a new element added to the combination by the very act of thought by which they are combined.” 11 When Johannes Kepler discovered that Mars moves in the shape of an ellipse, for example, “he bound together particular observations of separate places of Mars by the notion or, as I have called it, the conception of an ellipse, which was supplied by his own mind.” 12 9 William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded on their History. 2 vols (London: W. Parker, West Strand, 1840), 2: 213. It is perhaps no 10 Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 2: 214. 11 Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 2: 213. 12 William Whewell, On the Philosophy of Discovery: Chapters Historical and Critical (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1860), 253. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 289 coincidence that Whewell’s favourite example is taken from the science of astronomy which was often regarded as a model science because it seemed to epitomise one of the most pervasive myths of all sciences, namely the belief in some kind of distance or gap between the observed matter and the observing mind, gazing on this matter from the outside or at least from a different plane. Astronomy thus suits Whewell’s transport-model particularly well because the making of justified true belief is, on this model, simply regarded as an act of crossing the gap between ideal forms and material facts, the one being carried over to the side of the other. 13 The journey to known truth, one might say, invariably begins with a distinction between ideas and senses, thoughts and things, theories and facts, and ends, if it is successful, with their identification because, in Whewell’s view, “Inductions, Laws, Theories, which are true, are Facts.” 14 For the inductive process of gaining insights and proving theories starts and ends, as Whewell sees it, with distinct items and self-enclosed sites, “facts” and “concepts”; but it excludes - or does not take account of - the time that is needed to constitute and cultivate such items and sites in the first place. An obvious contention against this view of induction, however, is that there are, in reality, no fixed distinctions between mind and matter or things and thoughts, but only a multiplicity of mobile relations, allowing for different ways of interpreting how these categories interact. In fact, each time such established distinctions are used in practice, one might argue, they are drawn afresh. But this means that the time which is required and used, in practice, to translate theories into facts and vice versa, can only feature as a time of passive confinement, spent in transport from one definite location to another, rather than as a time of active exploration, unravelling existing definitions in order to disclose incipient fields which are no longer or not yet clearly defined. Just as Joule, then, Whewell reduces the time of conversion - the time that it takes to convert one thing into something else - to a predefined space that is already marked out in definite terms, restricting and controlling the movement within it, like a travel plan or a roadmap. 15 13 Ideas (or theories) and facts (or things) are the two fundamental elements of Whewell’s dualistic epistemology. “Ideas are the Form, facts the Material of our structure” (Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 2: 213). They largely correspond to Kant’s two primary sources of the understanding (“zwei Grundquellen des Gemüts”), the senses and the mind, whose duality is simply taken for granted. But it is precisely this active time of marking new trails, or marking 14 Whewell, Philosophy of Discovery 250. 15 This is one of the main assumptions of so-called practice theoretical approaches, closely associated with the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, which are particularly prominent in sociology and philosophy of science, while literary critics have only recently begun to discover their potential. For an overview see Joseph Rouse, “Practice Theory,” Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Vol. 15: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology (Am- P HILIPP E RCHINGER 290 existing trails anew, along with the modifications, alterations and dissipations these markings tend to engender, which has no room in Whewell’s epistemological thought. Consequently, the art of science, the skilful practice of navigating through uncharted fields, is explicitly banned from the domain of science, as he conceives it, because the laws and principles of this practice - so Whewell argues - cannot be fully captured in propositional terms, “consciously looked at in a general form.” 16 These principles - as Whewell knew well enough - rather involve a kind of practical knowledge or know how, a “Lebenswissen” which can only be acquired and expressed in the movement from one situation to another, 17 in wayfaring, but which cannot be reduced to a definite location outside of this movement. The grounds of practical wisdom, that is to say, always have to remain partly personal or tacit, escaping the determinate form of impersonal rules. If this were otherwise, if the principles of action could be spelled out as general laws, then human agency would no longer be sufficiently elastic to be tuned to changeable circumstances and tasks. In short, all kinds of practice or, as the Victorians tended to say, ‘art’ have moral or ‘firstperson’ components which elude the ‘third-person’ perspective of ‘science.’ 18 Whewell, being aware of this, consequently seeks to disconnect the temporal mode of doing from the spatial mode of knowing. He tries to purify the reasoning of science from the necessarily ‘impure’ influence of art, making as he does a pronounced case for a “rigorous separation of the Practical from the Theoretical.” 19 But in this way he inevitably has to leave his epistemology incapable of accounting for what Andrew Pickering has called “the performative aspects of our being,” including individual skills and styles, which escape all merely representational thought. 20 sterdam: Elsevier, 2006), 499-540 and Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr-Cetina and Eike von Savigny, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001). For a literary critical engagement with this approach see Oliver Scheiding, “Diskurse und Praktiken: Zur Literaturwissenschaft im Spiegel der ‘neuen’ Kultursoziologie,” Kulturtheorien im Dialog: Neue Positionen zum Verhältnis von Text und Kontext (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag), 177-198. 16 Whewell, Philosophy of Discovery 245. 17 See Ottmar Ette, ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004); Ingold, “Against Space” 154. 18 This is a topic by itself to which I can barely do justice here. A classic work on it is Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). For a brief introduction see H.M. Collins, “What is Tacit Knowledge? ,” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory 107-119. Ingold, “Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill,” Being Alive 51-62 is good on skill and Elijah Millgram, ed., Varieties of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001) offers an overview of the philosophical state of play in the field. 19 Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 2: 277. 20 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of another Future (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), 21. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 291 Implicitly, Whewell’s philosophy is therefore still based on a conception of scientists as detached spectators, importing inert facts into an existing framework which names, classifies and integrates these facts. What this view of induction as a kind of upward transport cannot accommodate, however, is a conception of scientists as creative experimenters, interfering with the living forces of the world, disturbing the economy of natural relations by their very practice of engaging with an environment, in which they, as human beings, have themselves always been immersed. More generally, indeed, Whewell’s epistemology is still firmly aligned with a theistic view of man as a special creation, extracting facts from or projecting ideas onto nature while somehow hovering above or outside of, rather than living within this nature. What Whewell could not (or did not want to) embrace, in short, is the fact that scientist, like all human beings, are not disembodied minds but living organisms which are enmeshed with their material environment, contributing to the changing constitution of this environment by the sheer activity of moving through and drawing meaning out of it. If there is one single ideology which was most thoroughly dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, then it is perhaps this idealist view of man as a special creation, inhabiting a mind that stands apart from the facts of matter, rather than being a part of it. Moreover, the dismantling of this dualistic ontology went along with intensive debates in the philosophy of science - especially between Whewell and his foremost opponent John Stuart Mill 21 - in the course of which the epistemology of transport was increasingly supplanted by, or at least supplemented with, what one might call an epistemology of wayfaring. The method corresponding most closely to this epistemology of wayfaring was an experimental method which, unlike the method of transport, is not so much premised on definite positions in space, as on a mobile capacity to respond to unpredictable variations as they occur in time. The experimenter, as the physiologist Claude Bernard puts it in an influential book on the theory and practice of this method, “guides himself by an assumed or provisional principle which he alters moment by moment because he is searching in almost total darkness.” 22 21 See Laura Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006). Bernard therefore compares the experimental procedure with a walk along “a winding road in the dark and over unknown hilly ground,” forcing the wanderer to go forward slowly and cautiously, pausing after each step. “Before taking a second step, he must make sure that he has placed his foot on a spot that is firm, then go forward in the same way verifying experimentally, moment by moment, 22 Claude Bernard, Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. Henry Copley Greene (1927) (London: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 48. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 292 the solidity of the ground, and always changing the direction of his advance according to what he encounters.” 23 In this sense, the experimental method incorporates and makes use of an insight which, in the aftermath of the debate between Whewell and Mill, became increasingly accepted among Victorian philosophers of science, although Whewell’s objectivism still tried to deny it, namely “that the complete attainment of the ideal position of the mere observer is nowhere to be secured even in Physics,” as the logician John Venn puts it in 1889. “No one of us can be spared to occupy the ideal logician’s seat; and if he try [sic] to do so he would find that he was perpetually leaving it, and mixing himself up in some way or other in the course of what should have been to him a wholly external world.” 24 This methodological argument is a consequence of, and feeds back into, a number of developments within science itself - most notably Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the second law of thermodynamics - all of which cast serious doubt on the belief in “a wholly external world,” distinct from lived practice and time. Instead, taken together, all of these theories promoted a relational ontology, according to which human beings - scientists included - can, as a rule, never stand outside of whatever they may want to examine, but only move in relation to it. Taking up one position, on this account, inevitably means gliding out of another and vice versa, but there is no one standpoint in which this relational motion could ever be brought to a halt. 25 “Each one of us has his own position amongst the objects which compose the world,” as Venn says it; “he has his own little sphere of activity which he may change only by taking up some other.” 26 The methodological consequence to be drawn from this belief, on Venn’s account, is that the position of a mere spectator must be regarded as no more than a “fictitious post” 27 because every act of observation is premised on a physical movement which mixes itself up in the “generative currents of the world,” 28 23 Bernard, Experimental Medicine 48. influencing these currents, just as they influence the movement of those who try to understand them. Even the astronomer, being subject to the same laws of gravitation as the stars at which he gazes, cannot help perturbing their course, however slightly, by the sheer “fact of observing them,” as Venn points out. “Every motion to or from his instrument, nay the very calcula- 24 John Venn, The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (London: Macmillan & Co, 1889), 20; 21. 25 See Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010), 13-42 and Christopher Herbert: Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001). 26 Venn, Principles 21. 27 Venn, Principles 21. 28 Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” Being Alive 214. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 293 tions he writes down on paper or the words he utters by his voice, are motions of matter, and therefore react on the motions of every other material thing in the universe, including the planets themselves.” 29 My point here is that the experimental method, as it is sketched and used by empiricists like Bernard, Mill and G.H. Lewes, may be seen as a practical enactment of this very conception, for this method is premised on the assumption that all knowledge originates in an act or event of what Mill calls “varying the circumstances,” a motion making a difference that may either be brought about accidentally or deliberately. It is, quite literally, a matter of fact, on this conception, that the physical practice of drawing determinable patterns of meaning out of indeterminate things just as much leaves its traces on these things as they, in turn, leave their traces on the meaning that is made out of them. 30 The circumstantial variation that sets an experiment in train, that is to say, may either be found or made, but in both cases the temporal processes that it instigates cannot be reduced to an ideal position outside of these processes, controlling the way they unfold. The art of experimentation, in this sense, not only involves movement, but is, so to speak, grounded on movement, because the only unalterable principle of this art is the belief that all knowledge originates in experiences which can only become imbued with form and meaning if - and because - they are acted out in time, that is: because they are lived. Indeed, one might say that one fundamental tenet of experimentalist science, as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, is the proposition that “time is of the essence” (to use a phrase of Latour’s) 31 because according to empiricists like Mill and Lewes there are, strictly speaking, no synchronic patterns, structures or ideas - not even the axioms of mathematics and geometry - which can exist without, or outside of, the diachronic practices and processes through which they are issued forth, modified, abandoned and held in place. 32 29 Venn, Principles 20. Whatever was, at 30 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being A Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (1843), 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1875), 1: 440. 31 Bruno Latour, “A Text-Book Case Revisited-Knowledge as a Mode of Existence,” The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, Judy Wajcman (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008), 88. On the compatibility of Latour’s approach with nineteenth-century concerns see also Steven D. Brown and Rose Capdevila, “Perpetuum Mobile: Substance, Force and the Sociology of Translation,” Actor Network Theory and After, eds. John Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 26-50. 32 This was one of the key sites of controversy between Mill and Whewell. For Whewell mathematical truths such as 2+2=4 can never be contradicted by experience because they follow from ideal principles or mental laws which have never had any connection with the senses in the first place. For Mill, even mathematical propositions have been P HILIPP E RCHINGER 294 any point, proposed to be true, was therefore always open to be modified and revised in response to unforeseen circumstances, thrown up by the irreversible flux of time. “There is no proposition of which it can be asserted that every human mind must eternally and irrevocably believe it,” Mill writes. 33 “In matters of evidence, as in all other human things we neither require, nor can attain the absolute. We must hold even our strongest convictions with an opening left in our minds for the reception of facts which contradict them.” 34 Rather than seeking to eliminate the vicissitudes of lived time from the method of science, then, Mill’s empiricism left an opening for them, allowing the experimentalist to calculate on the incalculable, to play with time in order to provoke surprising encounters that cannot be foreseen in advance. Experimentalism, in this sense, is a method that works with and through contingency, rather than fighting against it. It seeks not, unlike Whewell, to lift knowledge ‘upwards’ into a safe enclosure of theory, situated outside of the messy practice through which knowledge is generated in time. Experimentalism rather keeps theory ‘down’ in the ‘dirty’ field of practice by constantly trying and re-engaging this theory in order to provoke the emergence of further ideas which may then be fed back into established patterns, potentially modifying or reshuffling these patterns and so on. This does not mean that experimentalists cannot make progress, but it does mean that their progress is not guided by a final end, but only ever by what John Dewey later called “end[s]-in-view,” 35 provisional stations which remain open to be reconceived, however slightly. 36 From an experimentalist perspective, indeed, “the advancing movement of science forbids the notion of finality,” as G.H. Lewes puts it, whose work represents the stance of Victorian empiricism in exemplary ways. 37 abstracted from experience, for which reason he held that they are, in principle, modifiable by it. “Knowledge unfolds vista after vista, for ever stretching 33 Mill, System 2: 98. 34 Mill, System 2: 107-108. 35 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Company, 1925), 373. 36 Linking Victorian empiricism with American pragmatism may seem a long shot, but I do indeed think that one can make a plausible case for the first being a forerunner of the latter. It does not look like a coincidence, after all, that William James dedicated his programmatic 1906 lectures on Pragmatism (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995) “To the Memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader where he alive to-day.” 37 G.H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First Series: the Foundation of a Creed, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874-1875), 2: 452. The first series is the epistemological part of Lewes’s Problems which, altogether, consist of three series and five volumes. See also: Angelique Richardson, “Against Finality: Darwin, Mill and the End of Essentialism,” Critical Quarterly 53.4 (2011): 21-44. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 295 illimitably distant, the horizon moving as we move.” 38 As this suggests, the field of Victorian empiricism was not a closed territory comparable to a map, but an open-ended space, the boundaries of which kept changing along lines of becoming, drawn and redrawn by those who passed through this space. What must be understood quite clearly, however, is that the strong awareness of contingency and relativity displayed by authors like Mill and Lewes did by no means turn these authors into radical skepticists. They did not believe that man can have no reliable knowledge of the world at all, or that there is no rational way of distinguishing one truth claim from another. All they held was that every kind of true justified (including mathematical) knowledge was, at the time of their writing, still to be seen as provisional, subject to be modified in relation to empirical evidence which has not yet emerged. 39 II. Natural History The distinction between induction as transport and induction as wayfaring, as I have outlined it so far, is of course itself an abstract one that, in the textual practice of drawing patterns of knowledge out of lived experience, frequently tended to become blurred. Philip Henry Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope, for example, seems, at first sight, to represent a typical example of the spectatorial stance, with the author, a firm believer in divine design, acting as an authoritative “provider of scientific entertainment and instruction to a circle of friends.” 40 Gosse, that is to say, assumes the role of a naturalist turned showman, who, quite literally, magnifies the work of God by introducing his readers to an awe-inspiring world of miniscule proportions below the level of what is normally visible. 41 38 G.H. Lewes, “New Sea-Side Studies,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 81: 500 (1857: June), 680. More precisely, the text seeks to set up 39 For an authoritative explication of Lewes’s epistemological thought see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 251-330; Mill’s views are well treated in Elijah Millgram, “John Stuart Mill, Determinism, and the Problem of Induction,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87: 2 (2009): 183-199. As Millgram shows, for Mill, the Humean Problem of Induction - that experience can never provide us with absolutely reliable knowledge - is no problem in the first place because he rejected the very idea of a mathematical or “logical must” on which this problem is premised (191). For a more general approach to the possible role of the empirical in literary studies see Virginia Richter, “‘I cannot endure to read a line of poetry’: The Text and the Empirical in Literary Studies,” JLT 3.2 (2009): 375-388. 40 Philip Henry Gosse, Evenings at the Microscope; or, Researches among the Minuter Organs and Forms of Animal Life (1859), new edition, rev. and annotated (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1877), iv. 41 On the microscope as magnifier see Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 317-328. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 296 an “accurate inventory” 42 Motion arrests the eye everywhere. ‘The glittering swift and the flabby slow’ are alike here; clear crystal globules revolve giddily on their axes; tiny points leap hither and thither like nimble fleas; long forms are twisting to and fro; busy little creatures are regularly quartering the hunting ground, grubbing with an earnest devotedness among the sediment as they march up the stems; here are beauteous bells, set at the end of tall threads, ever lengthening and shortening; here are maelstroms in miniature, and tempests in far less than a teapot; rival and conflicting currents are whirling round and round, and making a series of concentric circles among the granules. of “the minuter organs and forms of animal life,” submitting these forms to the reader’s inspection by casting them in relatively common terms or re-cognising them as relatively common forms. To this end, Gosse typically begins with a panoramic view or “general glance,” before zooming in on ever more specific details, as, for instance, in his description of the aptly named amoeba diffluens or “Proteus” which he singles out of a teeming multiplicity of moving microbes, “an array of life, indeed! ,” as he cries out in his characteristically passionate and profuse style: 43 The microscopic perception and representation of organic motion is here still premised on an arrested eye, a stable vantage point outside of the observed play of living material, allowing the observer to draw relatively familiar descriptions of anthropomorphic “creatures” out of his unfamiliar subjectmatter (“busy,” “earnest,” “hunting ground,” “devotedness”) without being himself drawn into the “conflicting currents” whirling these creatures around. Yet, as Gosse puts on a higher power to focus on the activity of the Proteus amoeba, the stability of the inspecting viewpoint is increasingly affected by the mobility of the inspected matter which impels the writing to move along with its object, adapting and correcting its descriptions while trying to keep pace with circumstantial variations that cannot be anticipated or controlled. Thus Gosse tries to identify the “very irregular form” of the amoeba by comparing it with (or translating it into) “the outline of some island in a map,” only to find that the form in question refuses, in fact, to be contained in a single place that could be located on such a map since “it is not at two successive moments of exactly the same shape,” as he points out to the readers of his work: This individual, which when you first looked at it was not unlike England in outline, is now, though only a few minutes have passed, something totally different; the projecting angle that represented Cornwall is become rounded and more perpendicular; the broken corner that we might have called Kent has formed two little 42 Isobel Armstrong, “The Microscope: mediations of the sub-visible world,” Transactions and Encounters, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), 36. 43 Gosse, Evenings 378. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 297 points up in the position of Lincolnshire; the large bladder, which was in the place of the Eastern counties, is moved up to the Durham coast, and is, moreover, greatly diminished; and other like changes have taken place in other parts. 44 Although, in this instance, the geographical shape of England clearly serves as a blueprint or schema for the representation of the amoeba, Gosse’s writing manifestly struggles to accommodate the represented matter to this schema. For the described object, rather than standing still, keeps altering while it is being described, forcing the describing practice to alter with its material, adapting and redefining its ideal template - the map of England - as it proceeds. The activity of representation finds itself lured, one might say, into a “dance of agency” 45 with an equally active object whose movements keep exceeding and outrunning the boundaries of the schema through which they are supposed to be mapped out. Consequently, Gosse’s description appears just as capricious and amorphous as the animal that it attempts to describe, shifting and twisting in rather unpredictable ways. Parts of Kent are made to drift into Lincolnshire and the Eastern counties are moved up to the Durham coast as the author tries to fit his observations into a preconceived frame. The very form of Gosse’s writing, in other words, is exposed as contingent, as susceptible to become otherwise because it is bound up with a temporal movement that keeps running ahead of the spatial patterns seeking to grasp and fixate this movement. What has begun as a schema-based representation with a single centre has, in this way, been inadvertently turned into a process-based performance evoking a mobile tangle of views, 46 the outcome of which can no longer be reduced to an immovable design apart from practice and time. Gosse’s text, in short, represents - at least in this instance - not so much a definite matter of fact as an emergent structure, resisting to be transported out of the temporal medium, “the current of time” in which it is “immersed.” 47 Lo! Even while speaking of these alterations, they have been proceeding, so that another and totally diverse outline is now presented. A great excavation takes the place of Dorset: Kent is immensely prolonged; the bladder has quite disappeared, &c.; but it is impossible to follow these changes, which are ever going on without a moment’s intermission, and without the slightest recognisable rule or order. The projections are obliterated or exaggerated; the sinuosities are smoothed, or deepened into gulfs, or protruded into promontories; firths form here, capes there; but What Gosse tries to capture in conceptual terms is an exasperatingly mutable thing, provoking his writing to draw out ever fresh shapes: 44 Gosse, Evenings 379. 45 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1995), 22 and passim. 46 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetion (1968; London: continuum, 2004), 67: “Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a co-existence of moments which essentially distort representation.” 47 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 81. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 298 not by starts, but evenly, and with sufficient rapidity to be appreciable to the eye while under actual observation. 48 Isobel Armstrong has rightly argued that Gosse considers the scientist to be a representative of God whose task it is to reveal the traces of the invisible demiurge in the equally “invisible world” disclosed by the microscope. On her account, Gosse’s ‘vision’ is supposed to uncover an ideal design in the multiplicity of details to be found under the microscope. But in order to do this, she writes, he has to exclude “the third term of mediation,” the instrumental practice of making the invisible visible. 49 He has to conceal the art of translating what is seen into a general pattern that can be read. What I meant to show, however, is that this practice of mediation, the performative aspect of representation inevitably re-enters Gosse’s world whenever, as in the case of the amoeba, the subject-matter of his observations resists or escapes the ideal design that he intends to detect in them. For in these instances the observing act and the observed material drift asunder, compelling the former to respond to the demands of the latter, to move along with - and in relation to - it. In this way, the space of mediation or conversion between matter and meaning, ‘hand’ and ‘head’ or, in this case, perceiving and writing is turned into the site of an experimental dialogue or dance between at least two partners whose movements are yet to be mutually brought in tune. This experimental process of tuning, of “resistance and accommodation” 50 So my point, to sum up, is that Gosse’s writing, in trying to draw the changeable figure of the amoeba out of the flux of time and into the definite pattern of a map, represents not only what structure the amoeba looks like. It also represents how this structure is generated or made out, as one can see in the pencilled sketches, “successively drawn from one individual,” that Gosse inserts into his printed text. not only takes time. It also structures the experience of this time as a diachronic process that cannot be reduced to a synchronic state. It rather makes room, so to speak, for ever fresh findings and outlines to emerge from this process. 51 48 Gosse, Evenings 379-380. 49 Armstrong, “The Microscope” 36. 50 Pickering, Mangle 22. 51 Gosse, Evenings 379. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 299 To be sure, Gosse eventually gives up on his attempt to map the motions of the amoeba in terms of a definite shape, claiming that, in this instance, the change of forms is the essential principle of the animal’s identity, which, to his mind, explains the name Proteus. But even so, Gosse’s struggle to describe the amoeba in accurate terms, inevitably poses the question of whether a scientific method that is premised on fixed positions and definite principles is indeed capable of accurately coming to terms with a movement-based world that is not “in two successive moments of exactly the same shape.” After all, what Gosse’s drawings and descriptions represent is a series of provisional snapshots, exposed signs of fugacity and fleetingness that can only ever pin down what, a few minutes later, may no longer be the case. So one might say that, in representing nature in this way, Gosse has inadvertently nudged his writing towards the very relational or process-based world view from which the experimental method starts. For this method is not premised on the belief in an ideal design that is, as it were, imprinted on the earth to be re-cognised by human observers who gaze down on it. It rather works from the assumption that the design that can be found in nature evolves - and has always evolved - co-extensively with the human experience of this nature, taking shape through spatial practices in time. Therefore, the only way to acquire true justified knowledge of the world is, on this account, to go along with it, correcting and adapting one’s position as one proceeds, rather than trying to master the laws of nature from an ideal outside. “An experimenter must not hold to his idea,” Bernard writes. “But he must submit his idea to nature and be ready to abandon, to alter or to supplant it, P HILIPP E RCHINGER 300 in accordance with what he learns from observing the phenomena which he has induced.” 52 It is perhaps no coincidence that this notion of experimentation appealed not only to scientists, but also to writers of fiction because what the writing of novels, especially serialised realist novels, and the performance of experiments have in common, I would argue, is that they are temporally extended ways of provoking and modelling experiences of the world. 53 The only, albeit crucial, difference between these two ways of modelling experiences - the writing of fiction and the performance of scientific experiments - is that fictional models, unlike scientific ones, do not necessarily have to refer to a world, or an aspect of a world, that actually exists. Even if realist novelists aim to be true to the world in which their texts appear - which they often do - it is still, in any case, sufficient for them to be true to what might be part of this world, to what could, on the basis of the general knowledge and practical experience of their contemporaries, be reasonably imagined to be the case. This categorial difference aside, however, the practices of writing and experimenting, along with the course of “resistance and accommodation” through which meaningful forms emerge in the study and in the laboratory, may well be and therefore indeed - at least in the nineteenth century - have often been compared. George Eliot’s much cited claim that all her novels were “simply experiments in life” 54 and Emile Zola’s attempt to develop and promote a full-fledged theory of an “experimental novel” based on the work of Bernard are just the two best known instances of a variety of endeavours to describe the writing of novels in terms of the making of empirical knowledge. 55 52 Bernard, Experimental Medicine 23. Here, also, however, I would resist the temptation to describe this conceptual transfer as a kind of transport by means of which a given idea or, 53 See Michael Gamper, “Einleitung,” Experiment und Literatur: Themen, Methoden, Theorien, ed. Michael Gamper (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 9-14. 54 George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, vol. IV (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1954), 216-217. 55 For George Eliot see, for example, Bernard J. Paris: Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1965), 114-127 and Ansgar Nünning, “‘Experiments in Life’: Formen und Funktionen der narrativen Inszenierung von Lebenswissen und Lebenskunst in George Eliots Romanen aus der Sicht einer lebenswissenschaftlich orientierten Literaturwissenschaft,” Literatur und Lebenskunst: Reflexionen zum guten Leben im britischen Roman vom Viktorianismus bis zur Postmoderne, ed. Anna Margarethe Horatschek et al. (Trier: WVT, 2008), 83-117. The English version of Zola’s essay on “The Experimental Novel” (1879) is reprinted and commented in Gerhard Stilz, Walter Greiner, eds. Naturalismus in England 1880-1920: Texte zur Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 53-69. For the general debate on naturalism see Lyn Pykett, “Representing the Real: The English Debate about Naturalism 1884-1900,” Naturalism in the European Novel, ed. Brian Nelson (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1991), 167-188. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 301 in this case, a method travels from one self-contained field (‘science’) into another (‘literature’), with its places of arrival and departure remaining unchanged. My proposal, instead, is to see the Victorian drawing of science into fiction itself as an experiment that enabled writers of novels to explore their own skilful practice, their own art in relation to what seems to be other to, but has, in fact, always evolved along with it: the art of the scientist. III. Railroads of Sensation There is perhaps - especially with regard to the theme of mobility - no other genre which lends itself more to be studied as such an experimental engagement of fiction with science than the sensation novel. For the sensation novel is not only a relatively new kind of writing; it is also a genre that selfconsciously defined itself as new by absorbing the most recent developments in science and technology to a degree that was not lost on contemporary commentators. Henry James even declared Collins’s novels to be “not so much works of art as works of science,” the proper “mastery” of which required, on the part of the reader, “an index and a notebook.” 56 While this may be an exaggeration, the sensation novel certainly made new demands on its readers. It did so not only in that it addressed itself primarily to the “sympathetic nervous system” of these readers, as D.A. Miller has claimed, 57 On these grounds, Nicholas Daly has suggested a historical link between the Victorian criticism of these novels and contemporary accounts of the railway journey, arguing that, in the nineteenth century, the “traveler, like the reader of sensation fiction, is thought of as having been harnessed into a particular apparatus.” but also in that it tended to involve them in a dense meshwork of possible signs, false clues and hidden secrets, mobilising their need to discover the promised meaning at the bottom of this meshwork, to carry on reading and speculating until the whole plot is - or seems to be - disentangled at the end. 58 56 Henry James, “Miss Braddon,” The Nation (9 November 1865): 593-594. More precisely, Daly identifies the emergence of the railway - for many Victorians one of the most powerful icons of modernity - as the source of the excessive, but otherwise inexplicable nervousness that pervades almost all sensation novels, affecting both many characters like Walter Hartright in the Woman in White and the readers who are compelled to move along with these characters, accompanying them on their unsafe path into the future, with dangers and surprises lurking at every point. The sensation novel, on this account, registers and enacts a specifically modern condition of anxiety, restlessness and nervous tension that many Victorians 57 D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 146. 58 Nicholas Daly, “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses,” ELH 66 (1999): 470. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 302 would immediately associate with railway journeys. Reading sensation fiction was - like travelling in a Victorian railway carriage - a characteristically distressing experience, Daly argues, with regular concussions, unexpected jolts, fears of lateness, and the ever present risk of a major accident preventing the reader-traveller from settling into a more relaxed state, so that, on arrival, she was typically left exhausted, shaken and glad to have arrived. 59 This case for a connection between modernity, nervousness and the railway is convincing on many counts, not least because it provides a good reason for the fact that the railway forms such a continuous, if subtle thematic presence in almost all sensation novels, often dictating the all-important pace and timing of these novels. 60 Yet, having said this, the identification of reading and transport, which is implied in Daly’s argument, also tends to gloss over one of the key differences between these two modes of passing the time. In fact, the activity of reading and writing novels, unlike the activity of travelling to a particular destination, could and cannot be fully reduced to a cause or end outside of this process. The railway traveller, that is to say, travels mainly in order to reach a predefined location which is distinct from the process of moving there whereas the reader of sensation fiction reads mainly for the enjoyment of the process itself. For railway passengers, therefore, the stimulation of the nerves is a side-effect, temporarily to be tolerated for the sake of arriving at a terminus where they can relax. For the reader of sensation novels, by contrast, the stimulation of the nerves is often an end in itself. Indeed, one of the main Victorian criticisms routinely directed against the new wave of sensation novels was that “preaching to the nerves,” as H.L. Mansel puts it in his often quoted attack on these novels, appears to be the only purpose they have. “Excitement, and excitement alone seems to be the great end at which they aim - an end which must be accomplished at any cost by some means or other.” 61 So while Daly is certainly right to emphasise the fact that the nervousness on which much sensation fiction thrives, seems strangely ungrounded, “in excess of any actual narrative motivation,” one may question whether the historical arrival of the railway offers indeed the only explanation for these “nerves-without-a-cause” and the fascination they exerted on many readers at the time. 62 Another way of approaching the issue would be to say that the sensation novel engages with a condition that characterises the empirical subject more generally, namely its profoundly fragile, mobile and unsettled state of exis- 59 Daly, “Railway Novels” 471. 60 Cf. Daly, “Railway Novels” 473-474. See also Nicholas Daly, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009). 61 H.L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review (April 1863): 482. 62 Daly, “Railway Novels” 468. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 303 tence. After all, as Peter Garratt has shown, one of the central premises of Victorian empiricism is the belief that all human beings enter the world as mere bundles of nerves and sensations, yet lacking the knowledge on which their thoughts and actions are to be based. 63 Whatever knowledge of self and world people may have, as Lewes was fond of pointing out, is connate, not innate. It is acquired experimentally, in response to circumstantial variations. The spatiotemporal movement from one situation to another, provoked by sensual stimuli, is therefore, on this account, the only way through which this knowledge can be built up. Sensation writing, I would argue, can be read as a way of enacting and exploring this movement towards knowledge, “the processes of finding out and making sense” through which knowledge is generated in space and time, 64 along with the mental and experiential conditions through which these processes are actuated and maintained. This explains why almost all sensation novels - as early reviewers have regularly observed 65 - are, in one way or another, concerned with the unravelling of criminal plots and secrets, often involving amateur detectives like Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) who travels around - by train - between Essex, London, Southampton, Liverpool, Dorset and Yorkshire, collecting circumstantial evidence to shed light on the sudden disappearance of his friend George Talboys. 66 Indeed, the representation of Robert’s exploratory “movements” 67 is a good example for how sensation novels frequently reproduce - on the level of the represented events - the very practices of reading and writing or, more generally, of taking notice and leaving marks through which patterns of meaning are worked out in time. 68 In chapter XIII of the first volume, for example, when George has just gone missing and all the locations where he would have been most likely to be found - the Essex pub, Audley Court, the train station, Fig-tree Court, George’s father-in-law and Southampton port - have already been checked, Robert draws up a “record of all that has occurred between our going down 63 Garratt, Victorian Empiricism. 64 Andrew Pickering, “Living in the Material World: On Realism and Experimental Practice,” The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, eds. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 275. 65 One representative reviewer, for example, dubbed the sensation novel “The Enigma Novel,” Spectator 28 (Dec. 1861): 1428. 66 Cf. Daly, “Railway Novels” 474. 67 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (London: Penguin, 1998), 260. All references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text (LAS). 68 Critical interest, by contrast, has overwhelmingly focussed on the theme of madness as well as discourses of mind and brain, not only in this novel, but in sensation fiction generally. See for instance Jill Matus, “Disclosure as Cover-up: The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley’s Secret,” University of Toronto Quarterly 62.3 (Spring 1993): 334- 355; Winnifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: The Sensation Novel of the 1860s, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980). P HILIPP E RCHINGER 304 to Essex and to-night, beginning at the very beginning” (LAS 103). The key part here is that this record, also entitled “J OURNAL OF FACTS CONNECTED WITH THE DISAPPEARANCE OF G EORGE T ALBOYS ” contains references to “all that has occurred” so far, meaning that it is “ INCLUSIVE OF FACTS WHICH HAVE NO AP- PARENT RELATION TO THAT CIRCUMSTANCE ” (LAS 103). For what this shows is that the process of retrospective integration, which is often taken to be synonymous with narrative as such, is premised on a process of forward-looking addition, of accumulating numerous metonymic details, picked up from different places, which are no longer or not yet part of a pattern or plot. In fact, the very “theory of circumstantial evidence” (LAS 123) - quite central to many sensation and detection novels - hinges on the awareness that indeed everything, “all that has occurred,” even the tiniest coincidence, is potentially relevant for the construction of the explanatory structure on which a final forensic judgement may be based, as Robert Audley points out to Lady Audley in a chapter headed “On the Watch: ” Upon what infinitesimal trifles may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery, inexplicable heretofore to the wisest upon the earth! A scrap of paper; a shred of some torn garment; the button off a coat; a word dropped incautiously from the over-cautious lips of guilt; the fragment of a letter; the shutting or opening of a door; a shadow on a window-blind; the accuracy of a moment; a thousand circumstances so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer (LAS 123). In catalogues of accessories and particulars such as this, Braddon’s text exhibits the plentiful material out of which it is made, indicating that it assembles far more potentially meaningful details than whatever plot that is abstracted from these details may suggest. What I want to argue, therefore, is that many Victorian writers and readers of sensation novels knew well enough that these novels are not primarily made up of plots. Rather, they are made up of a complex texture of “infinitesimal trifles,” of “a thousand circumstances” that each reading has to concatenate into a new “chain” of story-links, repressing some of these trifles, highlighting others. Therefore, whatever general arrangements, plots or other structures one may detect in the meshwork that each novel represents can never exist outside of and apart from the individual practice of reading and writing through which these patterns are made out. And precisely because of their tendency - through an eminent cultivation of secrecy and an extended deferral of resolutions - to draw readers into a mere reading for the plot, sensation novels are particularly apt to make these readers aware of the sense-making practices, the activities of noting and construing through which the promised meaning is or, rather, is not revealed. For whenever sensation fiction is consumed merely in the page-turning manner, as a medium of transport geared to- Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 305 wards a final insight or point, the end of the text will most likely leave people in a state of lingering tension and non-fulfilment which can only be cured by beginning the journey anew - by picking up another novel of a similar kind and so on. Thus, in generating an insatiable appetite for more, sensation novels cannot help foregrounding that the final meaning or point, epitomised by the idea of the plot, is in fact no more than an illusion, an unattainable fiction in Venn’s sense, because all patterns of knowledge are threaded out of a movement of lived experience which, as long as one is alive, cannot be brought to a halt. All that the reading of these novels can eventually reveal, in other words, is that their meaning resides not in whatever plot may be extracted from them, but in the movement of plotting, the practice of collecting and interpreting circumstances through which this extraction is performed. Sensation fiction, then, by seeming to strap its readers into a particular apparatus, may also make them aware of a counteracting motion which seeks to escape this apparatus. In Lady Audley’s Secret, this inverse tendency is, again, reproduced in the actions of Robert Audley who often displays a notable reluctance to know as well as a propensity to break out of the machinery of secret machinations that drives him on to an end. For this end, as he suspects, can only disappoint him, likely as it is to make him find that his friend is dead. “Am I tied to a wheel, and must I go with its every revolution, let it take me where it will? ” he asks himself repeatedly. “Am I bound to discover how and where he died? ” (LAS 159). And: “Why do I go on with this? ” (LAS 174). The larger question Robert is made to ask himself here is whether there might not be other paths through the matrix of possible clues than the one towards a final insight which, if it is really final, must be equivalent with death; “shall I do a wrong to the memory of George Talboys by turning back or stopping still? ” (LAS 159) What is at stake, in other words, is the very end or purpose of the detective action that the novel’s main character performs or is made to perform by the writer and reader of the text. If this end is definite knowledge, as Robert’s questions suggest, then all the characters (in the double sense) through which this knowledge is established - along with the reading and writing process that fills these characters with life - must inevitably be, as George Levine would say, “dying to know.” 69 69 George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002). If the end of the novel is to keep the experimental process of sense-making alive, by contrast, then ultimate knowledge must again and again be deferred, concealed and promised anew, causing the knower to linger, take circuitous routes, or revisit places in which she had already been. In this latter case, however, the process of knowing - as well as the activity of reading and writing that performs this process - has far less to do with the mode of end-determined transport than P HILIPP E RCHINGER 306 with that of open-ended wayfaring which, as long as the wayfarer is alive, will always have somewhere further to go or something else to find out. What I am arguing, therefore, is that sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret integrate both of these motions. On the one hand, they seem to turn on the discovery of secrets, often rapidly transporting readers towards the last page. But on the other hand, they are also highly alive to the insight that the revelation of a single secret can never be the end or purpose of their existence as texts. Indeed, the meaning of their existence as texts can only be found in the process of interpretation, of reading, writing and discussing through which this meaning is constituted and re-constituted, like the open-ended trail of a wayfarer, again and again. As a mere string of words, that is to say, all texts are finished, ‘dead.’ On these assumptions, the unwillingness, with which characters like Robert Audley move towards what they often perceive to be an inevitable destiny, may also be read as an ironic exhibition of the awareness that, whatever secret may be revealed at the end, the meaning of the novel’s existence will certainly not be found there. “If I could let the matter rest; if - if I could leave England for ever, and purposely fly from the possibility of ever coming across another clue to the secret, I would do it,” Robert tells George’s stepfather Mr. Maldon, “- I would gladly, thankfully do it - but I cannot! A hand which is stronger than my own beckons me on.” (LAS 174) In such instances, the text foregrounds the contingency of its own method. For what Robert claims to be a necessary movement towards a final truth is simultaneously revealed to be the non-necessary act of a “hand” - that of the writer, reader, or, more generally, the interpreter - which could as well make him move otherwise. It is almost as if Robert was protesting against the remorseless way in which he is transported towards a goal that is tantamount to the end of his life as a character in the text: “How pitiless I am, and how relentlessly I am carried on. It is not myself; it is the hand which is beckoning me further and further upon the dark road whose end I dare not dream of.” (LAS 174) My point, then, is that Robert’s resistance against the “hand” which beckons him on may be seen as a symptom of the text’s awareness that a mere reading for the plot will inevitably turn its characters into mere functions of a transport-apparatus, inexorably carrying them towards a pre-destined end. At the same time, I would propose to see such passages as an invitation to read the sensation novel otherwise, against the grain, if you like. In this way, the text’s characters can be freed from the contingent pattern of enddetermined plots that the ruthless “hand” of the interpreter so often imposes on them. 70 70 For Collins’s The Woman in White, I have attempted such a reading elsewhere. See Philipp Erchinger, “Secrets not Revealed: Possible Stories in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/ 2009): 48-81. For an overview of different reading Instead, the process of reading and (re-)writing these novels can Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 307 be viewed as an experiment, a kind of wayfaring, as it were, that is not controlled by a pre-designed structure or purpose outside of this process, but takes shape along emergent lines, capable of being drawn out in many different ways. One way of justifying this approach is to point out that the sensation novel, like the railway, with which it engages, is - and has always been perceived to be - an inherently ambivalent medium, an observation that Daly’s reading bears out well. On the one hand, its form is clearly influenced by an impersonal rationalisation and standardisation of space and time, as it is epitomised by Bradshaw’s railway schedule. 71 Wilkie Collins’s late novel Heart and Science (1883) evokes both of these aspects - the personal and the impersonal - in its title, before going on to explore them through the characters Ovid Vere, an overworked physician who represents one of the excessively anxious Victorians, and Dr. Benjulia, a mixture of Byronic hero, Gothic villain and mad scientist, who deems himself to be “travelling on the road to the grandest medical discovery of this century.” But on the other hand, the characters through which the sensational form is constituted, as well as the readers and interpreters who bring these characters to life, are regularly affected by - and, indeed, thrive on - a deeply personal nervousness and restlessness, a nomadic waywardness, resisting to be controlled by definite structures and ideal forms. 72 Contrary to what the novel’s title may suggest, however, Collins’s text does not simply, in a dualist vein, pit the rationality of the scientific ‘head’ against the emotionality of the non-scientific ‘heart.’ Rather, the personal and the impersonal, or the general and the singular, part and whole are described as integral elements of one and the same movement towards knowledge. 73 methods see Ingo Berensmeyer, “Methoden hermeneutischer und neohermeneutischer Ansätze,” Methoden der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse. Ansätze - Grundlagen - Modellanalysen, eds. Vera und Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 29-50. For both Ovid and Benjulia are scientific practitioners, even though their methods could not be more unlike. For Benjulia, a “living skeleton” (HS 96), scientific research is no more than a vehicle of transport, a means to an end, for the sake of which he sacrifices the ability to be affected or moved by anything that lies outside of his predetermined course. Instead, he subjects all matters to the same, unswerving, indifferent gaze. “He pur- 71 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19 th Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986). 72 Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time, ed. Steve Farmer (Peterborough: Broadview, 1996), 190. All references to this edition are given in the text (HS). This novel has received very little critical attention so far. It is usually read as an intervention in the vivisection debate of the time. See Richard French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987). 73 See Jenny Bourne-Taylor, “The Later Novels,” The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 89-91. P HILIPP E RCHINGER 308 sued his own ends with a penitent cook, just as he pursued his own ends with a vivisected animal. Nothing moved him out of his appointed course, in the one or in the other” (HS 214). Benjulia, to use Levine again, is dying so much to know that he cannot live for anything other than knowledge, even though he is aware that, in this way, he is effectively annihilating his feeling self, along with the moral sensibility that originates in this self. His “grand problem,” as he calls it, possesses his existence, usurps his aesthetic responsiveness, and forces him into a relentless march towards a destination which can eventually, being the only motive for him to live, only deprive him of a reason to continue doing so. “I labour at it all day. I think of it, I dream of it, all night. It will kill me. Strong as I am. It will kill me.” (HS 190) At the end of the novel, Benjulia does indeed die, but not because he has found what he was looking for, but because Ovid Vere has, largely by accident, found it before him, thus causing the other man to commit suicide. The tragedy of Benjulia, then, is that his belief in the idea of absolute knowledge, “the one god I worship” (HS 190), has made him shed everything else of which his humanity is made up. In this way, he has gained an “impenetrable composure” (HS 245) which dissociates him from his sympathetic nervous system, but which also - and because of this - locks him up inside a machine-like motion that cuts him off from life. So if Benjulia represents the inhuman, technocratic side of science, as it is epitomised by the railway as a high-speed means of transport, then his counterpoint, Ovid Vere, represents the human or moral side of science, an uprooted and unfinished nervousness that is yet searching for a final destination or cause. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 309 Works Cited Anon. “The Enigma Novel.” Spectator 28 (Dec. 1861): 1428. Armstrong, Isobel. “The Microscope: mediations of the sub-visible world.” Transactions and Encounters. Eds. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 30-54. ---. Victorian Glassworlds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 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(1843). 2 vols. 9 th ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1875. Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Millgram, Elijah. “John Stuart Mill, Determinism, and the Problem of Induction.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87: 2 (2009): 183-199. ---, ed. Varieties of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘Experiments in Life’: Formen und Funktionen der narrativen Inszenierung von Lebenswissen und Lebenskunst in George Eliots Romanen aus der Sicht einer lebenswissenschaftlich orientierten Literaturwissenschaft.” Literatur und Lebenskunst: Reflexionen zum guten Leben im britischen Roman vom Viktorianismus bis zur Postmoderne. Eds. Anna Margarethe Horatschek et al. Trier: WVT, 2008. 83-117. Paris, Bernard J. Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1965. Transport, Wayfaring and Ways of Knowing 311 Pickering, Andrew. “Living in the Material World: On Realism and Experimental Practice.” The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Eds. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 275-297. ---. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1995. ---. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of another Future. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Pykett, Lyn. “Representing the Real: The English Debate about Naturalism 1884-1900.” Naturalism in the European Novel. Ed. Brian Nelson. New York and Oxford: Berg, 1991. 167-188. Richardson, Angelique. “Against Finality: Darwin, Mill and the End of Essentialism.” Critical Quarterly 53: 4 (2011): 21-44. Richter, Virginia. “‘I cannot endure to read a line of poetry’: The Text and the Empirical in Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory 3: 2 (2009): 375-388. Rouse, Joseph. “Practice Theory.” Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Vol. 15: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. 499-540. Rylance, Rick. Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850-1880. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Schatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr-Cetina and Eike von Savigny, eds. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 2001. Scheiding, Oliver. “Diskurse und Praktiken: Zur Literaturwissenschaft im Spiegel der ‘neuen’ Kultursoziologie.” Kulturtheorien im Dialog: Neue Positionen zum Verhältnis von Text und Kontext. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2011. 177-198. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19 th Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Snyder, Laura. Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Venn, John. The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. London: Macmillan & Co, 1889. Whewell, William. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded on their History. 2 vols. London: W. Parker, West Strand, 1840. ---. On the Philosophy of Discovery: Chapters Historical and Critical. London: John W. Parker & Son, 1860. Zola, Emile. “The Experimental Novel.” (1879). Naturalismus in England 1880-1920: Texte zur Forschung. Eds. Gerhard Stilz and Walter Greiner. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. 53-69. W ENDY P ARKINS Social Mobility and Female Agency: The Case of Jane Morris In this essay, I want to explore the relationship between literature and mobility in the nineteenth century through the example of Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris and the model and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There are two main reasons why Jane Morris is an appropriate figure to examine in this context. Firstly, as an icon of Pre-Raphaelite art, the figure of Jane Morris circulated in Victorian culture through representation in diverse forms. In George du Maurier’s cartoons for Punch magazine from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, for example, Jane Morris’s distinctive features were depicted to epitomize the Aesthetic woman as a tall, long-necked, undulating figure with drooping head, black frizzy hair low on the forehead, strong facial features and a melancholy expression. Through such caricatures, du Maurier publicized Aestheticism beyond the metropolitan coteries where it first began and, in the process, gave a form of public visibility to the distinctive features of Jane Morris, previously familiar only to those few who had seen a Rossetti canvas. In one well-known cartoon from 1880, the ‘Six-Mark Teapot’, du Maurier portrayed a figure resembling Jane Morris opposite an unmistakable version of Oscar Wilde, the two identified as the ‘Intense Bride’ and ‘Aesthetic Bridegroom.’ The fact that Jane Morris could serve as the feminine embodiment of Aestheticism alongside Wilde, representing the male Aesthete, shows how such figures could bridge the gap between high and popular culture, moving between domains that others sought to keep firmly apart (such as art and everyday domesticity, for instance). 1 1 See Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). With the death of Rossetti in 1882, when the artist’s work began to be more widely known - through gallery exhibitions, photographic reproductions and press descriptions - Jane Morris became the face of Aestheticism on a much wider scale, her fame no longer restricted to personal acquaintance or word-of-mouth communication among artistic and literary networks. Jane Morris provides, then, an example of the mobility of the image associated with the expansion of print culture, the development of new forms of visual technology and the rise of modern celebrity in the Victorian period. W ENDY P ARKINS 314 As a living embodiment of Aestheticism, Jane Morris was also a vehicle for the expression of conflicting ideas concerning women and the commodification of art, and here, too, the influence of du Maurier’s cartoons on perceptions of Aestheticism was evident. Vernon Lee’s novel critiquing Aestheticism, Miss Brown, for instance, featured a Jane Morris-like heroine whose surname was the same as du Maurier’s female character, Mrs Cimabue Brown, who featured in many of his anti-Aestheticism cartoons. 2 In Miss Brown, the eponymous character is central to Lee’s critical exploration of the popularization of Aestheticism and the marginalization of women as creative subjects within Aestheticism and Decadence. The first part of this essay will consider how Lee’s novel depicts the mobility and agency of the artist’s model in a way that suggests Lee was drawing on her personal acquaintance with Jane Morris. In the latter part of this essay, however, I will turn from representation to the historical subject herself in order to consider the role of literature in a life of Victorian social mobility. As a working-class woman who married up, Jane Morris is usually seen as a kind of Cinderella figure whose life and status was magically transformed when she consented to marry a middle-class man of independent wealth in 1858. I want to show, however, how her life may also be understood as consistent with Victorian accounts of working-class advancement through self-improvement in which reading played a crucial role. As scholars such as Jonathan Rose and Kelly J. Mays have argued, reading was central to the processes of self-formation by working-class subjects in the nineteenth century. 3 In Miss Brown, the working-class heroine who is offered an unexpected opportunity for a rapid social rise is also a devoted reader of everything from Dante to the daily newspaper. For Anne Brown, reading is not simply an escape from a life of drudgery as a nursery maid but a valued source of knowledge of a wider social reality. Over the course of the novel, and across widely-divergent social domains, Anne is buffeted by encounters with con- The success of Jane Morris’s social mobility depended on her ability to acquire the kind of cultural capital that was expected of a middle-class woman. Like the musical and language skills she attained, reading and a knowledge of literature were key ways in which she could both foster and display cultural capital and achieve a level of social acceptance within the new contexts of her life. All these new skills required the upwardly-mobile subject not simply to cultivate the appearance of gentility but to undertake a continuing commitment of time and attention that suggests a strong personal inclination towards the challenges and pleasures of such accomplishments. 2 Vernon Lee, Miss Brown [1884] (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2004). 3 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001); Kelly J. Mays, ‘Domestic Spaces, Readerly Acts: Reading(,) Gender, and Class in Working-Class Autobiography,’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30.4 (2008): 343-368. Social Mobility and Female Agency 315 flicting bodies of knowledge and world-views - such as Aestheticism, socialism and positivism - which she attempts to negotiate and master through self-education based on wide reading. Anne’s desire for independence leads to a decision to enter a women’s college but by the end of the novel she has succumbed to nervous prostration due to excessive study and renounces her plans to teach or write, returning instead to her unfaithful suitor and patron in order to rescue him from his vices through her wifely devotion. Miss Brown was widely regarded as a roman à clef in which Lee’s friends and acquaintances connected with Aestheticism (such as Oscar Wilde and William Michael Rossetti) detected unflattering references to themselves and Lee suffered a degree of social ostracism in England following the novel’s publication in 1884. 4 The forehead was high and narrow, the nose massive, heavy, with a slight droop …; the lips thick, and of curiously bold projection and curl; the faintly hollow cheek subsided gradually into a neck round and erect like a tower, but set into the massive chest as some strong supple branch into a tree-trunk. Particularly striking was the degree of physical resemblance between the heroine, Anne Brown, and Jane Morris. Anne is described, for instance, as possessing “heavy masses of dark, lustreless hair, crimped naturally like so much delicate black iron wire” and a distinctive physique: 5 Vernon Lee had met Jane Morris on a number of occasions, firstly in Italy, where Lee lived and Jane often travelled in the winters from the late 1870s onwards, and then subsequently in London when Lee became a regular visitor to the metropolis in the early 1880s in order to develop her literary reputation and social networks. In letters to her mother back in Italy, Lee described Jane Morris in admiring terms (Jane Morris in London was “more beautiful and grand perhaps than in Florence,” Lee wrote 6 ) and was scathing about Rossetti’s canvases, believing they had failed to capture Jane Morris’s beauty. 7 4 For the fullest account of the allusions to historical personages in Lee’s novel, see Leonee Ormond, ‘Vernon Lee as a Critic of Aestheticism in Miss Brown,’ Colby Library Quarterly 9 (September 1970): 131-54. After the publication of Miss Brown, however, the artist Marie Spartali Stillman (a friend of both Vernon and Jane) wrote to Lee to protest against her depiction of Anne Brown which Stillman read as an undisguised representation of Jane Morris: 5 Lee 14, 18. 6 Irene Cooper Willis, Vernon Lee’s Letters (privately published, 1937), 70, July 5, 1881. 7 Rossetti’s paintings of Jane Morris, Lee wrote to her mother, “mak[e] her look as if her face were covered with ill-shaven stubble, and [are] altogether repulsive. The pictures seem to me not merely ill painted and worse modelled, but coarse and repulsive.” Cooper Willis 126, July 11, 1883. W ENDY P ARKINS 316 I was so very sorry you had so accurately described Mrs Morris because I am sure she will feel much pain in being in evidence for every one must recognize her and she has suffered so much from being stared at and remarked and now she is so sensitive and suffering that she will feel it all the more. 8 We don’t know how Lee responded to Stillman’s letter 9 but elsewhere in her correspondence Lee referred to Anne Brown in connection with Jane Morris in a way that makes clear that the link between the two was intentional, not accidental. 10 Not only did Anne Brown seem to be closely modelled on Jane Morris’s appearance, but her story seemed a variation of Jane’s biography: both women were plucked from working-class drudgery to become the muse of an artistic movement and entered a social environment in which their ensuing fame and affluence ensured a degree of independence. 11 8 Qtd. in David B. Elliott, A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: The Lives and Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James Stillman (Easthampton: Antique Collectors Club, 2006), 133. Beginning the novel as a nursery maid of Scottish-Italian parentage, Anne is ‘discovered’ by the English painter-poet Walter Hamlin who sees Anne not only as a stunning model but the personification of his aesthetic ideals, just as Jane Morris was spotted by Rossetti in a theatre audience in Oxford and recruited as a model. Hamlin then arranges for Anne to be educated in Germany before she joins him in London (in anticipation of their marriage), where he introduces her as his muse to the artistic circles under his influence. While Anne is initially exhilarated by her escape from domestic service and entry into a vibrant cultural domain, she becomes increasingly disenchanted both with Aestheticism and her ambiguous relationship with Hamlin. In Miss Brown the question of women’s modern mobility is juxtaposed with women’s location in art, where the static quality of the artist’s model seems to symbolize the male artist’s desire to contain and control the woman who inspires him. While it is Hamlin’s patronage that allows Anne to leave servitude, travel Europe, and live a diverting life in metropolitan London, he is ultimately preparing her for a purely ornamental role in his life. Similarly, the social mobility - through travel, education and a private income from Hamlin - that Anne experiences is not a precursor to her autonomy: whether as muse, model or wife, she is expected to be a fixed embodiment of Hamlin’s aesthetic ideals in his home and he rebukes any sign of intellectual independence on her part. 9 Stillman and Lee subsequently reconciled their friendship in 1885. See Cooper Willis, 196. 10 In a letter to her mother in June 1886, Lee described gossip she had heard about Jane Morris’s unhappy marriage as “the sort of sequel to Miss Brown.” See Cooper Willis 219, July 29, 1886. 11 See Ormond 1970 and Jan Marsh, Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839-1938 (Horsham: Printed Word, 2000). Social Mobility and Female Agency 317 So, on the one hand, Anne Brown seems to exemplify women’s modernity signalled by her transformation from nursery maid into the icon of a modern artistic movement, even a celebrity in the modern sense. On the other, she is trapped by her obligation to Hamlin, whose conservative politics and bohemian lifestyle work together to preclude Anne from moving beyond his expectations of a feminine object of desire. Foreshadowing the kind of narrative trajectory that was common to New Woman fiction of the 1890s, Lee can only offer her heroine a tragic fate, doomed to marry a man she does not love and unable to achieve the independence she had worked towards through her continuing education, both literary and political, beyond the narrow confines of Hamlin’s aesthetic coterie. At the same time, however, the narrator’s insistence on Anne’s unique character, derived from her working-class background and Scottish-Italian heritage, sets her apart from the values of aesthetic London and suggests that some unassimilable element of identity or self remains untouched by the trappings of social mobility. The story of Anne Brown, then, comes to a narrative impasse. Anne’s desire for autonomy and a career falters and she accepts her fate to return to Hamlin and nurse him back to health in Italy, a place where she hopes he may be safe from the temptations of London or Paris. Turning from Lee’s tragic narrative of social mobility to the real-life example of Jane Morris reveals both parallels and disjunctures between these fictional and historical life stories. We might assume that Anne Brown and Jane Morris’s experience of social mobility was an increasingly common one in the nineteenth century but a study of women’s marital mobility between 1839 and 1914 - dates which coincidentally match Jane Morris’s lifespan exactly - suggests that this was not necessarily the case. Although, in this period, “almost 50 per cent of women married a man whose class position was different to that of their father’s,” lower-middle class women were more likely to marry down than working-class women to marry up. 12 Further, working-class women “were 50 per cent more likely to move into the middle class than their brothers, but still only one in ten did so.” 13 Although rates of upward mobility for working-class women rose over the course of this period and marriage “provided the principal vehicle for their mobility,” then, Jane Morris was still an exception in her lifetime. 14 Like Anne Brown, Jane Morris also accepted a life of domesticity as the price of social mobility but as the wife of William Morris she was not bound by the same expectations of feminine confinement as Walter Hamlin imposed on Anne Brown. William Morris’s relatively progressive views on the status 12 Andrew Miles, Social Mobility in Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 153. 13 Miles 175. 14 Miles 164, 174. W ENDY P ARKINS 318 of women meant that the Morris household was a space where Jane and her daughters, Jenny and May Morris, were given a greater freedom than in other Victorian middle-class families, even if they still also carried out domestic tasks traditionally associated with femininity. It has been assumed that Jane Burden underwent some kind of training or education during the period of her engagement to William Morris, in order to prepare for her social transition and the new duties and status that would follow her marriage. Although no archival record of this transformational process has survived, Jane Morris possessed a proficiency in music and French that cannot have been part of her rudimentary schooling in Oxford. Her letters also attest to her abilities in Italian, a learning process that may have begun during her engagement but which she certainly continued during her first visits to Italy. Later still, a number of contemporary sources mention Jane learning to play the mandolin. 15 Within an artistic household, moreover, Jane Morris was frequently in the company of artists and writers, both men and women, and accounts of these social occasions do not convey the same sense of elitism and snobbery that Vernon Lee attributes to the Hamlin circle in Miss Brown. 16 The writer and friend of Rossetti, Theodore Watts-Dunton, went so far as to claim that Jane was “superior to Morris intellectually, she reached a greater mental height than he was capable of, yet few knew it,” pointing to the “ease and facility” with which she had acquired French and Italian, and the speed with which she had compensated for her lack of education during her engagement to Morris. 17 The artist William Rothenstein, who only became acquainted with Jane Morris in her later life, also recalled that Jane was “an admirable talker, wholly without self-consciousness, always gracious, and in her person beautifully dignified…. Women married to famous men are over-shadowed by their husbands; but when they survive their husbands, there comes sometimes a late flowering, previously, perhaps, held in check.” 18 In other words, Jane Morris’s upward mobility was not an overnight ‘make-over’ but an ongoing intellectual and aesthetic development that placed value on interior as much as exterior transformation. Reading, as a These two vignettes of an accomplished, poised woman counter the view of Jane Morris that some contemporaries perpetuated, in which she was a living tableau, as passive and unchanging as the Rossetti portraits she resembled. Instead, they provide an insight into a historicised subject who evolved over time in response to the changing circumstances and contexts of her life. 15 See, for example, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922, Vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 233. 16 See, for example, Georgiana Burne-Jones’s account of the Red House years (1861-5) in her Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1904). 17 Theodore Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces (New York: Dutton & Co, 1916), 10. 18 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1872-1900 (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 288. Social Mobility and Female Agency 319 form of self-education and a means of cultivating a feeling, contemplative self, was particularly noteworthy in this regard. In autobiographical narratives of self-improvement told by working-class subjects in the nineteenth century, reading was often prioritized as an invaluable means of transcending the limitations and deprivations of their position. Reading formed an indispensable component of working-class auto-didacticism, ensuring that learning was not understood as limited to a particular phase of life (associated with formal education) but continued over the recorded course of a lifetime. 19 We can only speculate that Jane Morris’s early life was characterized by textual impoverishment in a relatively illiterate household. Her formal education in the local parish school would have been primarily devoted to the kind of feminine skills designed to equip working-class girls for domestic service and their own family duties. With her engagement to William Morris, then, a new world of reading opportunities and other cultural practices was opened up to Jane Burden. In a letter to Rossetti in 1878, Jane wrote that “I still keep up my old habit of reading every scrap that comes in my way,” a remark that evokes both a powerful desire for reading and implies a scarcity of available reading material in early life that continued to influence Jane Morris’s voracious reading habits twenty years after her marriage. 20 Her constant reading echoes the experience of many of the readers and autodidacts described by Rose (2001), Mays (2008) and Gagnier (1991) in their respective studies of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography and selfformation where the desire for texts - whether entertaining or instructive - was a powerful drive for subjects who felt they could never make up for the literary deprivations of early life and for whom books were associated with autonomy, escape or betterment in various forms. Working-class life narratives of “liberation via literacy” also associated reading with the attainment of an internal and emotional emancipation that was sharply distinguished from the economic dependence and self-abnegation the writers associated with wage-slavery. 21 19 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 43. For working-class readers in this period, Mays contends, reading could be an important collective or public experience but it 20 John Bryson & Janet Camp Troxell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 80, September 1878. In the letter from which this quotation is taken, Jane asked for information about “a story of an intensely sensational character” that she had found on the reverse of a newspaper cutting sent her by Rossetti. Her interest was piqued by the fact that the hero’s name was “Boddlebak,” which she takes to be a name of Icelandic origin. This letter suggests that Jane had acquired some knowledge of the Icelandic literature that William Morris dearly loved. 21 Mays 344, 345. W ENDY P ARKINS 320 was also an activity crucial to the development of an autonomous and internalized sense of self and agency. 22 The desired form of selfhood, however, was inevitably inflected by gender as well as class, not least because the solitude and space necessary for the cultivation of an interiority derived from reading was differently understood by men in waged labour and women primarily responsible for domestic labour. 23 As Mays notes, many working-class women’s narratives ambivalently represented “reading as always demanding forms of privacy and secrecy that exclude the family and induce feelings of worry and guilt rather than pride” and thus as differentially available to men and women. 24 A love of reading, linked to a “desire for private space and time, solitude, and silence,” could be a source of familial conflict, especially for women who noted a discrepancy between their own opportunities and those presented to their brothers, or whose mothers valued domestic skills over scholarship. 25 Until the late nineteenth century, moreover, “autodidact culture was an overwhelmingly male territory.” 26 The diversity of reading represented in Jane Morris’s letters provides a picture of the extent of her reading, including poetry, biography, journals, fiction (of diverse genres) and essays, as well as newspapers and periodical literature. Discussion of books was, in fact, often the chief topic of her extant correspondence with Rossetti and others, just as reading was a favoured shared pastime. In November 1875, Rossetti wrote to his mother from Bognor requesting her to send books - “Reading is very scarce here” - to be shared with Jane Morris, who would be lodging nearby while she modelled for his painting, Astarte Syriaca: A woman from the working class who acquired through marriage the desired “space and time, solitude and silence” for private reading may, then, have experienced a form of liberation or autonomy that was fraught with ambivalence: both a precious opportunity and a confirmation of the gulf that now separated her from her family of origin, especially perhaps from an illiterate mother. Mrs Morris has I believe returned you the D’Arblay with which she was more delighted than I think I ever knew her to be with any book. She has now got Evelina. I told her you had many amusing ones & would probably lend some to an honest borrower, but I fancy she is shy of asking. 27 22 Mays 347-8. 23 Mays 345, 347. 24 Mays 355. 25 Mays 347, 353-5. 26 Rose 18. 27 William E. Fredeman (ed.), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vol. 7 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 125, November 1875. Social Mobility and Female Agency 321 Writing to his mother again at the end of the month, however, Rossetti is critical of the books sent: The books you sent Mrs Morris are in perfect safety at her house but with the exception of Louis XIV (and that she already knew much by other books), the selection was not a lucky one for her, as she takes no interest whatever in the Royal Family & Vicar of Wakefield & Macaulay’s Lays had long been known to her. The D’Arblay book was new to her & a great boon & she has since read Evelina (of which in these glutted days a new railway edition has nevertheless just appeared) with great pleasure. 28 Rossetti’s repeated assurances of Jane’s enthusiasm for Burney’s novel and diaries (published as The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay and reprinted many times by 1875) were no doubt in part intended to mollify his mother for his sharp criticism of her other choices. What is also clear in this letter is Rossetti’s insistence on Jane Morris’s accomplishments, her possession of cultural capital (she has already read much of what has been sent), that his mother (he implies) has under-estimated. Rossetti’s repetition of Jane’s fondness for Burney’s work in these letters, however, also presents another clue to the importance of reading for Jane Morris. In Evelina, Burney’s ambivalent depictions of the possibilities and pitfalls of social mobility emerging in the late eighteenth century represents “a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World” (in the words of the novel’s subtitle) as an active process, requiring and inscribing bodily transformations - of dress, voice, demeanour, gesture. 29 Rossetti’s defence of Jane Morris’s breadth of literary knowledge was no exaggeration. Remarks taken out of context from the Rossetti correspondence have been interpreted to mean that Jane Morris was unsympathetic to poetry but her correspondence reveals a sustained interest in the work of Coleridge and Dante, among others. While Fanny Burney’s books often describe an aristocratic milieu, her observations of the difficulties of women negotiating space and agency within the confines of class and gender hierarchies, and of the emotional and affective consequences of social mobility, may have provided an imaginative resource for Jane Morris that offered echoes of her own life situation. 30 28 Fredeman 150. She also often discusses a wide range of bio- 29 Frances Burney, Evelina or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance in the World, 1778 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002). 30 When Rossetti sent Jane Italian translations of Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song poems for children, Jane replied “I return the verses of Christina’s, they seem very funny as far as I can understand them, I still find difficulties with poetry, as you can imagine” (Bryson & Troxell 80), September 1878. Jane’s comment, that is, refers to her facility with Italian idiom, not with poetry per se. The other comment that has been taken to mean Jane Morris was not fond of poetry is again from one of Rossetti’s letters when he writes: “Do not say that poetry is far from you. It should be nearest to us when we need it most, though indeed I know how difficult it sometimes is to feel this” (Bryson & Troxell 16), March W ENDY P ARKINS 322 graphical literature, including memoirs, correspondence and journals (such as by Boswell, Vasari, Walpole, Scott, Balzac), and a diverse mix of fiction. She liked Samuel Richardson as well as Burney and, among contemporary novelists, liked George Meredith but disliked Mary Ward’s The History of David Grieve (1892) which “seemed to me a laboured and unnatural description of a number of excessively disagreeable people, about whom I did not feel interested.” 31 In her lengthy correspondence with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, with whom she had an affair from the late 1880s to the early 1890s (and a friendship of even longer duration), Jane Morris again frequently discussed her reading. While her letters to Blunt may at times have an aspirational quality - discussing people, events and books in which she assumes he will take an interest and showing herself informed on such matters - she does not scruple to disclose to him that she also reads popular contemporary literature (although it often disappoints her or is only taken up as a last resort). In fact, throughout her correspondence there is an almost insatiable need for books; whether at home or away, there are repeated requests for books to be sent, returned, or recommended, as well as accounts of re-reading loved texts, and there is no surer sign of serious ill-health than when she reports she has been unable to read. Writing to Blunt from Italy in 1885, for instance, Jane noted, with dissatisfaction, her enforced indolence: “My time here is passed in walking and idling, for I must not read much, it is a great privation, I am used to reading in bed … but this is strictly forbidden to me now by all: powerful doctors.” 32 The value of reading in the everyday life of Jane Morris is also demonstrated in the keepsake books she made. 33 10, 1880. Here, Rossetti seems to be referring to an occasion when failing health prevented Jane from reading (as his previous letter of three days earlier had also implied). These books incorporated a wide range of quotations - from late medieval, Romantic and Victorian verse, in French and Italian as well as English, as well as aphorisms and nursery rhymes. Also prominent in these handmade books are extracts from contemporary writers such as John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne and (interestingly) Vernon Lee. In a book bound in red 31 Peter Faulkner (ed.), Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt together with Extracts from Blunt’s Diaries (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1986), 64, February 27, 1892. 32 Faulkner 6. Jane Morris mostly used “: ” in place of a hyphen in her letters. Without necessarily going to the extreme of the rest cure made famous by the American doctor Silas Weir Mitchell, Victorian doctors could often advocate the therapeutic benefits of forms of rest and sensory deprivation that recommended against reading or other intellectual activities for (female) patients. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1985), 138- 40. 33 Three are now held in the British Library and a fourth, a gift to Rosalind Howard, is in the Castle Howard Archives. Social Mobility and Female Agency 323 leather, for instance, Jane Morris has copied the following quotation from Ruskin: There is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation: talk to us in the best words they can choose, and with thanks if we listen to them. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, -- & can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant audience, but to gain it, -kings and statesmen lingering patiently in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our book-case shelves, -we make no account of that company, -perhaps never listen to a word they would say all day long. 34 Taken from the first essay in Sesame: Of Kings’ Treasuries and originally presented as a lecture in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute in Manchester in 1864, Ruskin’s plea for the value of books and literature as a democratizing form of sociality may have spoken powerfully to a working-class reader whose aspirations had been a source of isolation in early life. In effect, Jane Morris’s keepsake books chart a writing of the (reading) self. As Stephen Colclough reminds us, the transcription of a text within a commonplace book is an intensive reading experience: the choice and isolation of short passages from longer texts require close and careful attention, as the reader re-makes the text for her own purposes. 35 The red keepsake book, in particular, features a number of extracts relating to the value and pleasures of reading, a sentiment shared both by middle-class Victorians as well as working-class autodidacts, and demonstrates that the maker of the keepsake book has acquired not only the design and decorative skills to produce such an artefact but the knowledge and love of a diverse sweep of literary texts from which to choose the entries. A life rich in cultural, as well as financial, capital is given material form in these handmade objects, painstakingly produced with care and attention to detail. If Jane Morris was not a ‘self-made’ woman in the common-sense (and commonly gendered) understanding of the term, she was nonetheless a “self-made reader,” to use Richard Altick’s term, making a self through reading and writing practices. 36 In 1895, Jane Morris wrote to Blunt that “I am always inventing plots for novels, and if I ever find myself anywhere in peace I believe I should develop them, but I daresay they would be bad and would not sell.” 37 34 British Library Add 45351A. Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies: Three Lectures was first published in 1865. The “peace” Jane Morris sought for writing may have eluded her - if, indeed, this statement was meant to be taken seriously - but reading seems to have been a constant solace in her life as well as a powerful means of connection with 35 Stephen Colclough, “Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience,” Publishing History 44 (1998): 18-19. 36 Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957), 240-259. 37 Faulkner 93, October 26, 1895. W ENDY P ARKINS 324 others. The significance she placed on reading as a practice that could enhance a community is also suggested in a letter she wrote to Sydney Cockerell in 1897, about the “possibilities of founding a sort of club-village reading room” in Kelmscott. 38 While she would go on, with the collaboration of the architect Philip Webb, to have two workers’ cottages built in Kelmscott in memory of her husband, it is interesting that the reading-room plan seems to have been her first idea. 39 Curiously, Jane Morris also described to Blunt a paucity of books at Kelmscott Manor: “we have been rather excited by putting up a new book: case to hold what I call reading-books. Several ‘friends’ have complained of the dearth of books to read in this literary man’s house.” 40 For her, it is clear, books were not merely aesthetic objects, as important as the craft of printing and book design may have been to her (also demonstrated by her interest in the Kelmscott Press 41 In Upward Mobility and the Common Good (2007), Bruce Robbins argued that narratives of upward mobility perform significant cultural work but he focuses his attention on masculine protagonists in nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century cinematic heroines. Earlier narratives of a female protagonist’s social advancement (more typically, a woman of middle rank rising to gentry or aristocratic status) depicted “her erotic bonding with a social superior and the promise of a new, socially elevated family to come” ), they were “what I call reading-books” that should not be confined to the “literary man’s” library but form a vital part of the everyday spaces shared by family and friends. There could, it seems, never be enough books in her life. 42 38 Hammersmith & Fulham Archives, September 24, 1892. , but in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown such a narrative ended in failure and self-sacrifice, with the heroine in virtual exile in Italy tied to a broken man she does not love. Vernon Lee’s re-telling of Jane Morris’s story as one of thwarted desire and ambition offered a powerful critique of the gendered privileges of Aestheticism but failed to capture the complexities of class and gender in this context. In denying her literary heroine the agency to act differently, Lee presented a bleak story of social mobility that contrasts with Jane Morris’s 39 The first mention of her plan for workers’ cottages appears in a letter to Webb in August 1898 (BL Add 45342), but a year earlier Jane Morris had reported to Cockerell that she had “had a talk with Mr Hobbs [the owner of Kelmscott Manor at that time] … but there appears to be little chance of any success [for the village reading room]. He has no barn he can spare and any new building in the place would be an eye-sore unless we can spend a large sum of money and much thought on it” (13 Aug 1897, Hammersmith & Fulham Archives). 40 Faulkner 93. 41 Jane Morris’s interest in her husband’s Kelmscott Press is often overlooked but I address this and other affinities shared with William Morris further in my forthcoming Jane Morris: The Burden of History (Edinburgh UP). 42 Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), 2. Social Mobility and Female Agency 325 story of successful, if still painful, acquisition of cultural capital through upward mobility. Jane Morris did not simply have a higher social status bestowed on her, once for all, through her marriage. Instead, her adult life exemplified a remaking of what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus. 43 Habitus is a concept developed by Bourdieu to describe how social class is acquired and perpetuated, not simply as an individual or group identity but as a set of embodied dispositions through which a subject engages with the social world and understands her place within it. Through this concept, Bourdieu sought to overcome the limitations of accounts of class formation that privileged either social determination or individual agency. As “a product of history, that is of social experience and education,” habitus “may be changed by history, that is by new experiences, education or training,” although such transformations are not easily accomplished. 44 43 See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Habitus,’ Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier & Emma Rooksby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 27-34. Jane Morris’s social mobility required the acquisition of new skills and knowledge to befit her new role and class position but it also brought about an altered sense of self through her location and participation in new affective networks of family, friendship and intimacy. Much of these sustained processes of upward mobility remain invisible (and probably unrecoverable) to scholars but one aspect of ‘self-improvement’ that connects Jane Morris’s narrative with that of other stories of Victorian working-class advancement was the value placed on reading. A re-making of self premised on a desired cultivation of an autonomous interiority and intellectual independence was closely linked with the freedom to read widely. Through extensive reading, Jane Morris gained a hugely expanded range of cultural references, allusions and affinities through which to communicate a newly-made self with others who spoke the same literary language. 44 Bourdieu 29, original emphasis. W ENDY P ARKINS 326 Works Cited Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Habitus.’ Habitus: A Sense of Place. Eds. Jean Hillier & Emma Rooksby. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 27-34. Bryson, John & Janet Camp Troxell (eds.). Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1904. Cobden-Sanderson, T.J. The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, 1879-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969. Colclough, Stephen. ‘Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience.’ Publishing History 44 (1998): 5-37. Cooper Willis, Irene. Vernon Lee’s Letters. Privately published, 1937. Elliott, David B. A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: The Lives and Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James Stillman. Easthampton: Antique Collectors Club, 2006. Faulkner, Peter. Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt together with Extracts from Blunt’s Diaries. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1986. Fredeman, William E. (ed). The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Vol 7. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008. Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920. New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Lee, Vernon. Miss Brown. 1884. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2004. Marsh, Jan. Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839-1938. 1986. Horsham: Printed Word, 2000. Mays, Kelly J. ‘Domestic Spaces, Readerly Acts: Reading(,) Gender, and Class in Working-Class Autobiography.’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30.4 (2008): 343-368. Miles, Andrew. Social Mobility in Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century England. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999. Ormond, Leonee. ‘Vernon Lee as a Critic of Aestheticism in Miss Brown.’ Colby Library Quarterly 9 (September 1970): 131-54. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Robbins, Bruce. Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Rothenstein, William. Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1872-1900. London: Faber & Faber, 1931. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Penguin, 1985. Watts-Dunton, Theodore. Old Familiar Faces. New York: Dutton & Co, 1916. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD Melville’s Carpetbag: Nautical Transformations of the Authorial Self Nautical Mobility: The Author as Global Traveler In 1856, burned out by ten years of furious literary production, harsh reviews, declining royalties, and personal difficulties ranging from squabbles with his family to serious bouts of depression, Herman Melville embarked on an extended journey to Europe and the Middle East. Since his literary debut with Typee in 1846 he had published eight novels and completed one more, written fifteen stories for America’s two leading journals, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Magazine between 1853 and 1856, and collected five of the stories in a volume he called The Piazza Tales (1856). He had written one book a year for ten years, somewhere in excess of 4,000 pages of published work, and countless more manuscript pages that have been lost. This amounts to more than one page a day, a relentless pace for a writer who had at the same time been furiously educating himself by devouring Shakespeare, Dante, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, and dozens of other classic and contemporary authors even as he was producing novels with the heft and depth of Moby-Dick (1851). He was an inveterate reader and annotator of texts, and much of his marginalia has survived as a record of his autodidactic efforts. He was a similarly fast-paced writer, and often found himself composing conclusions to his novels while their opening chapters were being set in type. He is a case study for Harold Bloom’s theories of the anxieties of authorship, to which I would add the pressures of relentless deadlines and financial necessity. In 1851, while he was working on Moby-Dick, he wrote his new friend Nathaniel Hawthorne to complain that “Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.” 1 Although he was only thirty-two years old he felt worn out, he told Hawthorne, “like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood” and believed that he had “come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.” 2 Melville lived one of the most physically mobile lives of any author up to his time. Driven by financial necessity, his father moved the family from 1 Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth, vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1993), 191. 2 Melville, Correspondence, 14: 191, 193. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 328 Manhattan to upstate New York when Melville was eleven. At eighteen, Melville made a round-trip on a merchant ship from New York to Liverpool, a journey he memorialized in Redburn (1849). A year later, in 1840, he journeyed west to visit his uncle Thomas Melvill Jr. in Illinois, traveling the length of the Erie Canal, crossing America’s inland sea of the Great Lakes, and voyaging by steamboat on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, a trek of thousands of miles that worked its way into numerous references in his later writings, as Hershel Parker has shown. 3 His early nautical travels culminated when he signed on to a whaling voyage for the South Seas in 1841, rounding Cape Horn into the vast Pacific where he spent a month living among cannibals on the Marquesas islands, a month beachcombing in Tahiti, four months working in Hawaii, and one year as an enlisted seaman on the naval warship the USS United States, visiting Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil on the long return trip to Boston. By the time he was twenty-five he had seen more of the world than most people see in their lifetimes, and had visited more exotic lands than all but the boldest travelers today. Among antebellum writers not even James Fenimore Cooper, who spent four years at sea as a deckhand and a naval officer, voyaged so widely or took such advantage of America’s maritime prominence as a bicoastal nation with extensive inland water routes. Truly, Melville spoke for himself in Moby-Dick when his narrator, Ishmael, says that “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” 4 Part of the appeal of England was Hawthorne’s presence in Liverpool, where he served as United States consul, and Melville visited with the older author and his family on both his outbound and inbound voyages. Hawthorne, in England with his wife, three children, and a maidservant, tended to stay in one place for several years or months, moving about as little as possible given the requirements of his job, his less adventurous temperament, and the huge amounts of luggage that his entourage carried. In sharp These nautical journeys exercised a decisive influence on Melville’s literary career and his personal values, for they exposed him to the harsh lives of laborers and an ethnic pluralism that would be unusual even in today’s globalized world. It is no wonder, then, that when his health and his career began to flag in the mid-1850s, he again sought solace in travel, a seven-month sea-journey across the Atlantic to England, through the Mediterranean to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and back home again once more via England, an idiosyncratic grand tour that reshaped his literary ambitions and personal values. 3 Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 166-79. 4 Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1988), 112. Melville’s Carpetbag 329 contrast, Melville traveled alone and carried only a week’s worth of clothing. In a journal comment that bespeaks at least some envy of the younger man’s freedom of movement, Hawthorne noted that his friend needed only “a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling-gear,” which seemed “the next best thing to going naked”; Melville, Hawthorne added, had “learned his travelling-habits by drifting about, all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trowzers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticizable manners than he.” 5 The two men’s modes of travel contrast as sharply as their conception of literature. While he was abroad, Hawthorne wrote The Marble Faun (1860), a self-conscious “romance” about Americans in Italy and the clash of morals, religions, and aesthetics that ensue. By far his longest novel, The Marble Faun depends on such well-worn conventions as light and dark heroines, gothic villains, sexual intrigue, stylized descriptions of landscape, and the ambiguities of dream and reality Hawthorne had long cultivated in his stories. Melville, on the other hand, had just completed his second shortest novel, The Confidence-Man (1857), a work that can only be described as post-modern, with its minimalist plot, multiple digressions, episodic structure, and three chapters of authorial commentary on the art of fiction. It is like nothing Hawthorne ever wrote, yet he consented to act as Melville’s agent in England and place the book with a London publisher, which he did four months later while Melville was visiting Italy. 6 This biographical information highlights a shift in notions of authorship as a stable profession in which authors present a relatively consistent face and style to their readers to one where the author disappears, or as Roland Barthes would have it, dies. Whether Hawthorne ever read this strange novel is uncertain, but we do know that it was the last one Melville ever published. 7 5 The English Notebooks, 1856-1860, ed. Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis, vol. 22 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1997), 170. At the end of The Marble Faun, for example, Hawthorne left several strands of his plot dangling, a willful obscurantism that upset readers and reviewers. In the novel’s second printing, Hawthorne obligingly added a “Conclusion” in which the author enters the narrative to ask his two American characters to fill in the missing details, which they conveniently provide. Although Hawthorne did not like adding such an explicit explanation of events meant to be shrouded, he felt free to enter the 6 “Historical Note” in Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 10 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1984), 313. 7 Barthes makes this argument in many places, but the most notable is the early essay “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-48. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 330 narrative in his own voice in order to discharge his responsibility to his readers and illuminate the novel’s dark corners. Melville felt no such obligation in The Confidence-Man. It literally ends in darkness, with the final incarnation of the title character, known as the Cosmopolitan, extinguishing a lamp just before the novel’s last sentence: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” 8 Set on a steamboat traveling south on the Mississippi River, the novel draws its setting from Melville’s early western travels yet is anything but a literal or biographical rendition of that experience. All traditional components of narrative - plot, character, theme, structure - share in the nautical mobility of the fluid setting. The title character may be one person in many disguises, several tricksters who exploit passengers as they board and depart the steamboat, or an entirely symbolic incarnation of mythic figures who expose the venality of human beings. Some critics view the confidence-man as an allegorical figure of Christ, while others identify him with Satan, a disagreement so extreme that it suggests the novel can mean anything. 9 Generic Mobility: From Fiction to Poetry Most characters have no proper names and are denominated by what they do or what they wear or their dominant trait, such as the gentleman with the gold sleeve-buttons, the Herb-Doctor, the philanthropist, or the misanthrope. These multiple narrative indeterminacies enforce larger moral and philosophical indeterminacies, leading many readers to seek epistemic refuge in irony, satire, parody, hoax, or the labyrinthine alleys of black humor. Whereas Hawthorne’s conception of authorship remained stable throughout his career, Melville’s shifted dramatically after Moby-Dick and, with respect to fiction, culminated in the unorthodoxy of The Confidence-Man. The literal mobility that Melville enjoyed as a seafarer and solo traveler serves as a metaphor for the generic mobility of his fiction, a movement away from the conventions of the American historical romance as described by George Dekker to something closer to the novels of James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, or Kazuo Ishiguro. 10 As an autodidact Melville was largely free of institutionalized structures of knowledge, and like Ishmael “swam through libraries and sailed through oceans” 11 8 The Confidence-Man, 251. just as he had roamed the Mediterranean and Levant, carrying only a carpetbag to keep himself nimble and open 9 For an excellent conspectus of the varying interpretations of this novel, see John Bryant, “The Confidence-Man: Melville’s Problem Novel,” in A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 315-50. 10 See George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987). 11 Moby-Dick, 136. Melville’s Carpetbag 331 to new experiences. He had spent ten years trying to please English and American audiences while still telling the capital-T Truth, and finally decided that no one wanted to hear it: as he said despairingly in his 1851 letter to Hawthorne, “[b]ut Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth - and go to the Soup Societies. … What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” 12 None of his novels had been more of a botch than The Confidence-Man, which even today remains difficult to read, and after that sublime failure Melville made a calculated generic move from fiction to poetry, a genre he had experimented with in his novels and had studied for many years but which, he knew, would pay even less than fiction. 13 He had already published humorous sketches, book reviews, and short stories, so he was no stranger to other forms of writing. But moving to poetry involved a careerchanging shift to a genre that almost guaranteed obscurity, particularly the type of verse he preferred, replete with jagged meters, half-rhymes, archaic diction, realistic details set in contrast with lyrical effusions, and unconventional stanzaic structures. The connection between his physical and generic mobility is evident in the title he gave a group of early poems that remained unpublished until 1891, “Fruit of Travel Long Ago,” poems based on his 1857 Mediterranean journey. The mobility of sea travel released him from the genre that had sustained his imagination and career for over a decade and liberated him to seek “Truth” in more fluid and supple forms: “Like all decent poetry,” Robert Penn Warren keenly observes, “that of Melville aims at the moment of poise, of synthesis, but for him the poise and the synthesis are hard-won, and often incomplete and provisional, and the awareness of that fact is the point, the ‘truth,’ of poetry.” 14 Yet American readers no more wanted such “provisional” truths than they wanted a divided nation, and Melville’s first published book of poetry, Battle-Pieces (1866), a verse chronology of the Civil War, met with devastating reviews that doomed it to failure. 15 12 Correspondence, 191. Nevertheless, Melville stayed the course and published nothing but poetry for the remainder of his life, a period three times as long as the time he spent writing fiction: four published volumes, three long unpublished manuscripts, and one lost unpublished volume of poems he completed in 13 For Melville’s extensive reading in poets and poetics, see Hershel Parker, Melville: The Making of the Poet (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2008). 14 Selected Poems of Herman Melville (1967; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998), 27. 15 See Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence, Kansas: UP of Kansas, 1993), 441. One of the more acidulous reviewers Garner cites said of Battle- Pieces that “no one but Mr. Melville could have written it, and few besides himself would have cared to write it,” while another said “his poetry runs into the epileptic. His rhymes are fearful” (441). D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 332 1860. Billy Budd, the novella he left in manuscript at his death in 1891, actually began as a poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” and one reason he did not publish Billy Budd was that he first focused on bringing out his last volume of poetry, Timoleon (1891). Scholars have largely ignored Melville’s poetic output, proving themselves similar to Hawthorne’s readers who want authors to stay within familiar bounds and who express disappointment when they try something new. Melville was more aesthetically capacious than such readerly proscriptions demanded, and in his most ambitious poem, Clarel (1876), demonstrated how physical mobility can influence an author’s selfconception. Few people, even die-hard Melvilleans, have read Clarel. They might argue about how to pronounce it - Clárel, Clarél? - and leave the poem alone after that, intimidated by its 18,000 lines of irregular iambic tetrameter, complex metaphors and allusions, incomplete rhymes, and confusing medley of speakers, including its distant narrative overvoice. The most recent biography of Melville, Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work, devotes only nine pages to the poem in a chapter on the poetry tellingly titled “Adrift,” and considers it “finally a hopelessly talky poem, its intertwined stories over-earnest in the style of Mardi, yet without the madcap energy that made Melville’s early failures seem rehearsals for something grand.” 16 16 Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 285. Its full title, however, reveals the important connection between genre and mobility: Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, and clearly announces that it is something quite different from Melville’s earlier works. Based on Melville’s 1857 excursion on horseback into the deserts of Palestine when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, Clarel follows the journey of a dozen male tourists from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and back in ten days. It is also the high point of Melville’s literary pilgrimage from fiction to poetry, away from the anxieties of writing on a popular topic as he attempted in Battle-Pieces, away from the tradition of the American romance, and, most profoundly, away from America itself. Of the twenty-nine characters in the poem, only seven are American, and four of those are expatriates. Major speakers include a theology student, a sailor, a former Confederate soldier, an Anglican priest, an embittered Swedish revolutionary, a French Dominican, and a hunchbacked Italian orphan, while the supporting cast consists of an American Zionist, an evangelical millennialist, a Greek banker, a fun-loving young Cypriot, an enigmatic Druze guide, a Turkish armed escort, an Albanian warrior, a retired Mexican general, a Greek abbott, a Jewish scientist, a rigid Scottish Presbyterian, a Franciscan monk, and a dozen or more minor players. Few American literary works have such a cosmopolitan cast of characters, and their impassioned discussions of religious, political, and social issues explore a wide spectrum of ideologies ranging from orthodox Melville’s Carpetbag 333 Christianity to atheism, revolutionary democracy to monarchism, heterosexuality to homosexuality, and linear to cyclical notions of history. Published in 1876, fortuitously, perhaps, in the centennial year of America’s Declaration of Independence from Britain, the poem immediately sank into an obscurity more profound even than Battle-Pieces. Yet it bears comparison to other great nineteenth-century poems of self-analysis and religious doubt, such as Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850) and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), whose metrics it follows, and it expands across global and multicultural planes of thought and reference comparable only to Moby-Dick and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855-1891). The combination of Melville’s experiences with maritime mobility, his independent and lonely travel in the Mediterranean, and his move from writing fiction to writing poetry constitute the transnational impetus behind Clarel and his own redefinition of himself as a poet. The poem’s explorations of history, space, and self depend on mobility of mind and body and art as they achieve their literary force in a work that Robert Penn Warren, one of its earliest appreciators, considers “a precursor of The Waste Land, with the same basic image, the same flickering contrasts of the past and the present, the same charade of belief and unbelief.” 17 Historical Mobility: Rome in Clarel American identity has long been founded on myths of newness: the New World, New England, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s “new man,” the New Deal, the New Frontier, all catchphrases from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Melville had propounded this doctrine early on, as did most antebellum Americans, but after his Mediterranean journey he developed a greater regard for the virtues of antiquity. One of the most powerful motifs in Clarel is the pervasive presence of the Roman Empire, from its religious manifestations in the Roman Catholic priests and abbots who speak up for the church again and again to the secular shards of ruins that lie about the territory of a supposedly spiritual landscape. Rolfe, the American whom most critics take to be closest to Melville’s point of view, finds the durability and flexibility of the Roman Catholic Church especially appealing. As a sailor, wanderer, and adventurer, Rolfe might be expected to harbor the anti- Catholic prejudices of his countrymen, which were undergoing a recrudescence of parochialism in response to Tammany Hall’s reliance on Irish Catholics for political dominance in New York City. Instead, Rolfe admires Catholic rituals for their organic response to basic human needs, as when he asks Derwent, the Anglican clergyman, how far back these rituals go: 17 Robert Penn Warren, ed., Selected Poems of Herman Melville (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998), 36. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 334 stands it true in fact That robe and ritual—every kind By Rome employed in ways exact— However strange to modern mind, Or even absurd (like cards Chinese In ceremonial usages), Not less of faith or need were born— Survive untampered with, unshorn; Date far back to a primal day, Obscure and hard to trace indeed— The springing of the planted seed In the church’s first organic sway? (4.16.151-62). 18 Derwent, a trained theologian, confesses that he has not studied such things, an omission that undermines his intellectualized and institutionalized approach to religion in contrast to the common man’s intuitive sense of its timeless power, even when the manifestations of that power seem “absurd.” The modern and enlightened beliefs of the Church of England appear insubstantial and insincerely tolerant and progressive in the figure of Derwent, who fails to see the human need to place oneself in history and locate that organic link with “a primal day” that binds all human beings in spiritual amity. No single character speaks for Melville in Clarel, however, unlike the firstperson focalization of Moby-Dick and his early novels. Clarel employs a distant and often ironic narrative overvoice like that in The Confidence-Man, placing Melville at a distance from his multitude of speakers and giving them the opportunity to hold forth with minimal authorial interruption or analysis. Alert readers will notice that Rolfe’s favorable view of Catholic rituals has a secular counterpoint in the poem’s many allusions to the Roman Empire, a secular side to the Roman motif that offers an alternative vision of history. Melville gives the venerable topos of the “ruins of Rome” an unusually positive twist in the poem’s references to the material Roman artifacts that still stand, imposingly, across a wide swath of European, African, and Middle Eastern landscapes. Even the new American man Rolfe stands in awe of history’s immediate presence, and introduces his long question to Derwent by comparing the durability of Catholic ritual to “Caesar’s tower on London’s site” (4.16.150), 19 18 Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 12 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1991), 440-41. Parenthetical documentation is to book, canto, and line numbers. and throughout the poem the marble reality of Roman architecture undergirds the poem’s narrative observations. Just before an earlier colloquy between Rolfe and Derwent, the poetic overvoice describes the 19 Clarel, 440. Melville’s Carpetbag 335 broken landscape of the Judaean hills as the pilgrims journey through it on horseback: Uplands they range, and woo the breeze, Where crumbled aqueducts and mounds Override long slopes and terraces, And shattered pottery abounds— Or such would seem, yet may but be The shards of tile-like brick dispersed Binding the wall or bulwark, erst, Such as in Kent still serve that end In Richborough castle by the sea— A Roman hold. What breadth of doom As of the worlds in strata penned— So cosmic seems the wreck of Rome. (2.20.29-39) 20 Roman aqueducts, massive and stunning monuments to another era, have survived the ravages of time to fulfill their purpose in a later age as do the bricks in Richborough castle. Even when broken into shards, they remain as omnipresent reminders of Roman hegemony, and are as integrated into the landscape as the strata that nineteenth-century geologists were studying to ascertain an ever greater age for Earth and explode biblical notions of creation. Rome may be a “wreck,” but in hyperbole worthy of a contemporary astronomer staring at distant nebulae, it is a “cosmic” wreck, a wreck of such vast scope that it has made a permanent impression on the planet itself. Melville’s admiration for Roman civilization grew directly out of his travel, and his journal from his 1856-57 trip repeatedly mentions the vestiges of Roman power he noticed in Greece, Turkey, and Italy. When he returned to the United States in 1857 he wrote a lecture praising Roman architecture and statuary and delivered it to at least sixteen audiences on the winter lyceum circuit in states from Massachusetts to Michigan. 21 As the Roman arch enters into and sustains our best architecture, does not the Roman spirit still animate and support whatever is soundest in societies and states? Or shall the scheme of Fourier supplant the code of Justinian? Only when He fashioned a moral for America out of the Roman arch, finding in its physical durability a symbol of conservative virtue in opposition to recent innovations in modern politics, art, and economics: 20 Clarel, 195. 21 For the list of cities where Melville delivered this lecture, see The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860 , ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1987), 723-24. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 336 the novels of Dickens shall silence the satires of Juvenal. … All the merchants in modern London have not enough in their coffers to reproduce the Apollo.” 22 Neither the newfangled socialism of European idealists, the blunt prose of English realists, nor the commercial wealth of London merchants can match the timeless power and beauty of Roman art and architecture, and in a final sally at English modernism he asked his audiences whether the glass panels of London’s Crystal Palace would “bide the hail storms of eighteen centuries as well as the travertine of the [Roman Coliseum]? ” 23 By 1877 Melville decided that the high point of civilization occurred during the second and third centuries of Imperial Rome, an opinion he derived from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). In a letter to his brother-in-law John C. Hoadley, Melville included a draft of his poem “The Age of the Antonines” - the title is borrowed from Gibbon - and praised the period for its peacefulness, secularism, social order, and rule of law. It was, he wrote, the “summit of fate and zenith of time,” which he hoped would return. Of course not, I can imagine the patriotic American audiences thinking, and as we know they turned out to be right. 24 Theological Mobility: Oceanic Doubt He did not publish the poem until 1891, by which time he had altered the last two lines to identify his own country explicitly with Rome: “Ah, might we read in America’s signs / The Age restored of the Antonines.” This alteration, following as it does Melville’s musings on Rome in Clarel, shows how profoundly his travels turned him from an ardent literary nationalist to a critic of American excess, from an advocate of the moderns to a defender of the ancients. Time, history, old and new collapsed in Melville’s mature appeal to such eternal values as civic virtue, personal dignity, and deep regard for the accomplishments of earlier generations, enforcing a cyclical theory of history that advocated restoration, not revolution. As a nineteenth-century world traveler, most of Melville’s journeys were necessarily by ship, either canal boats, steamboats, square-riggers, or the modern steamships he used on his Mediterranean journey. As late as 1860 he traveled around Cape Horn to San Francisco on his brother Tom’s clipper ship, the Meteor, his last extended sea voyage, and he continued to draw upon nautical experiences in his poetry, most notably in his penultimate volume of verse, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888). Space, for Melville, meant 22 Piazza Tales, 408-09. 23 Piazza Tales, 409. 24 Correspondence, 453. Melville’s Carpetbag 337 the sea, for there one encountered vast expanses of globe-encircling water that made possible movement between continents. Anyone before the twentieth century who claimed a first-hand acquaintance with world cultures had to travel by sea, and those who knew it well understood that islands, archipelagoes, and ships themselves had cultures of their own to contribute to transnational awareness. Although Clarel is set on land, Melville took many opportunities to infuse it with the nautical mobility he recalled from his past, and employed sea imagery throughout the poem, anticipating W. H. Auden’s identification of the sea with the desert in The Enchafèd Flood. Drawing repeatedly on Moby-Dick and Melville’s descriptions of the dry wilderness of the Galápagos Islands in “The Encantadas,” Auden contends that despite their obvious differences, both locales offer freedom from community and personal responsibility yet at the price of an alienation that creates “desperate longings for home and company.” 25 In Clarel, which Auden predictably ignores, Melville transforms this social desperation into theological alienation and existential seeking. The canto “The High Desert” (3.5), an interior monologue ascribed to the entire group of pilgrims, presents through narrative summary their unattributed questionings of whether faith can withstand the assaults of science. Melville uses the ebb and flow of the ocean’s tides to symbolize the ebb and flow of Christian faith: … is faith dead now, A petrifaction? Grant it so, Then what’s in store? what shapeless birth? Reveal the doom reserved for earth? How far may seas retiring go? (3.5.79-83) 26 The metaphor of “seas retiring” and leaving earth without faith is, of course, a strong echo of “Dover Beach” from Matthew Arnold’s New Poems (1867), a book Melville acquired in 1871 and annotated heavily. As Arnold puts it, The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled; But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating to the breath Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. 27 Melville complicates Arnold’s metaphor by asking if faith is already dead, “a petrifaction” like the high desert of Judaea where this thought emerges, fus- 25 The Enchafèd Flood or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950; Charlottesville, Virginia: UP of Virginia, 1979), 15-17. 26 Clarel, 278. 27 Matthew Arnold, New Poems (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 96. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 338 ing land and sea and offering a more spatially comprehensive vision of impending atheism than Arnold’s poem, which concludes with the image of lovers finding faith in each other on a “darkling plain.” Melville knew the sea’s terrors as well as its delights, and from Moby-Dick on he viewed it as the ultimate emblem of nature’s indifference. The most nautically infused digression in Clarel (1: 37) recalls the true story of George Pollard, captain of the doomed whaleship Essex that was sunk by a whale in 1820, the event that gave Melville the idea for the Pequod’s fate in Moby-Dick. Pollard survived the wreck by resorting to cannibalism, and went on to captain another ship into the Pacific. This time he encountered uncharted shoals and was again shipwrecked, although with less dire consequences, and he never returned to the sea again. Ishmael recounts this history briefly in Moby- Dick (ch. 45), and on a visit to Nantucket in the early 1850s Melville actually saw George Pollard, who had become the town’s night watchman. 28 Psychological Mobility: The Authorial Self For Melville the experienced sailor, the sea is no more a “sea of faith” than is the stony and sterile Judaean desert a symbol of immortality. The Holy Land is not, in fact, holy at all. Imposing such spiritual significance on these morally neutral landscapes ignores brutal experiences like George Pollard’s, where the freedom and exhilaration of sea travel leads to death, disaster, and the loss of personal identity. Melville’s life, career, and art illustrate a transcultural pattern of mobility as vital and life-changing as anything experienced by twentieth-century authors, and in Clarel that pattern reconstructs the identities of both the poem’s characters and its author. For all of the pilgrims’ arguments, debates, and unresolved dialogues, their pilgrimage remains deeply unsatisfying, for it exposes not only their own differences in religious faith, ranging from atheism to ardent Catholicism, but is marked by the deaths of two of their number. For those unfortunate men the journey of faith ends in the ultimate loss of identity - annihilation. Both are buried en route, bereft of the very rites of passage that religion confers, and while one is a believer and the other a skeptic, in death they are treated alike. The desert is as equally devastating as the sea: one of the pilgrims actually drowns in the Dead Sea, a dark irony that shows death is everywhere, God is silent, and belief remains a matter of stubborn faith in the face of nature’s contrary evidence. 29 28 Clarel, 755n. 29 For a good study of God’s simultaneous presence and distance in Clarel, see Stan Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1993). Melville’s Carpetbag 339 The surviving pilgrims fail to achieve anything like a collective identity and end up either smugly confident in their prior beliefs like Derwent the Anglican priest, constantly searching like Rolfe the adventurer, permanently alienated from their homeland like the ex-Confederate soldier Ungar, or hopelessly adrift in a sea of theological uncertainty like Clarel, the young student whose search for religious assurance has failed. One of Melville’s favorite terms for his seafaring characters was ‘isolatoes,’ men who found shore values so constricting that they began a new voyage as soon as the old one ended, not even stopping to repack their duffel bags for the next journey. These are men for whom mobility is mere repetition, continually voyaging out and returning in an endless, changeless cycle. Philosophically, this is the fate of Clarel’s pilgrims. None is really changed, none has made progress, none has answered the questions he raised in dialogues or personal meditations. But the characters are not the author. Just as he made a dramatic shift in genre undergirded by a courageous seven-month journey alone carrying nothing but a carpetbag, so for Melville Clarel constituted a spiritual and literary journey through the deserts of faith, doubt, and authorship that he had traversed since writing Moby-Dick. Although his characters achieve little, Melville achieves much: 18,000 lines of powerful, complex, original verse that readers are still working to comprehend. Clarel confirms the wisdom of his turn from fiction to poetry, the generic mobility that led him to stick to his last and concentrate on poetry for the remainder of his life, with the brilliant exception of Billy Budd, which grew from a poem and concludes with the moving ode “Billy in the Darbies.” By the time of his death in 1891, Melville had not only mastered the great tradition of English poetry but extended it into modernity, taking a middle path between the quiet innovations of Emily Dickinson and the grand, self-promoting breakthroughs of Walt Whitman. After his meeting with Melville in Liverpool in 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the following journal entry recounting their conversation on the beach: Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists - and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before - in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. 30 In Clarel, Melville found a way to express these concerns dialogically in a moving testament to the importance of mobility in genre, time, and space, a 30 The English Notebooks 1856-1860, 163. D ENNIS B ERTHOLD 340 “wandering to and fro” that coalesced into a stoic sense of personal worth that strengthened him against the indignities he suffered from reviewers and the reading public. By absorbing his physical movements into his spiritual, intellectual, and literary development, Melville rescued himself from annihilation, albeit at the cost of a commercial career. He knew that he could not go on writing for money or for audiences that neither appreciated nor understood his work, and The Confidence-Man had been his bitter farewell to that model of authorship. In poetry he found a better genre for penetrating the philosophical issues he had confronted in Moby-Dick, and he persisted even though he had to publish Clarel with the aid of a large subvention from his uncle and print his last two books of poetry in private editions of twenty-five copies each. Even as he took religion more seriously, giving dramatic voice to priests and monks, whom he had satirized in earlier works, he challenged their assumptions and practices with the knowledge he had gained both in his travel to the Holy Land and in his reading. He drove a final wooden spike into the Emersonian myth of self-reliance, still so prevalent in the United States that it is a required claim even for presidential candidates who come from families worth millions of dollars. By stripping himself of society’s demands for fame, money, success, and power, by traveling light and free of preconceptions and stereotypes, by carrying only a carpetbag for life’s necessities, he kept room in his mind and art for the fresh experiences and personal growth that mobility can contribute to our lives. Melville’s Carpetbag 341 Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. New Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-48. Bryant, John. “The Confidence-Man: Melville’s Problem Novel.” A Companion to Melville Studies. Ed. John Bryant. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. 315-50. Dekker, George. The American Historical Romance. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. Garner, Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence, Kansas: UP of Kansas, 1993. Goldman, Stan. Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1993. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The English Notebooks 1856-1860. Ed. Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis. Vol. 22 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat et al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1997. Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Vol. 12 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1991. ---. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Vol. 10 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1984. ---. Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1993. ---. Moby-Dick or The Whale. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1988. ---. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1987. Parker, Hershel. Melville: The Making of the Poet. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2008. ---. Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. 1. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Warren, Robert Penn, ed. Selected Poems of Herman Melville. 1967. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998. Call for Papers Towards a Post-Exceptional American Studies edited by Winfried Fluck and Donald E. Pease American studies, envisioned in the 1930s and institutionalized after World War II, was from its very beginning tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. As recent debates have shown, this American exceptionalism does not merely claim uniqueness and difference for “America,” but asserts a political and moral superiority resulting from specific American visions and virtues. In response, American studies have begun to widen their analytical scope from national to transnational perspectives. Should Transnational studies be the new American studies, then? Recent debates have complicated this happy scenario of transition and insisted on a continuing need to also analyze developments within the U.S. itself. How can this be done, however, without falling back into an exceptionalist framework? What can be the contours, themes, and methods of an American studies that is tied, neither to the idea of American exceptionalism, nor to an exclusively transnational perspective? This volume of REAL wants to provide a contribution to the theory and method of a post-exceptional American studies. We invite contributions on theoretical issues, methodological debates and suggestions, but also examples of a new analytical practice.