Reading Response to Hobbs, Wilmot, and Behn

“A Perfect Diurnal of Some Passages in Parliament” describes Charles I’s execution day. Charles gives a speech in which he lays out his case as innocent victim: he is innocent, he never began a war with the two houses of Parliament, he never intended to encroach upon their privileges, Parliament confessed the Militia was his, and despite these facts, Charles forgives everyone. I admit that I am quite suspect about the validity of the piece. Did the execution go down exactly as recited? I am suspect because it seems that it was common for the dominant authority to create “death-bed” (or “death-scaffold”) confessions and reaffirm the deceased’s commitment to God. For example, we read many execution-day confessions of pirates in Dan William’s class that were obviously formulaic, and there is John Wilmot’s death bed conversion that, from my understanding, few scholars believe. I do believe that Charles I gave a speech, and it probably was very similar to the one written down; however, I just wonder how accurate it could be in an era without recording equipment other than the pen. On the other hand, I see no motive in his declaration of his innocence; I guess it depends upon the political sympathies of the recorder.

I thought Thomas Hobbes was very interesting. During long walks I sometimes listen to recordings about philosophy, and I often hear Hobbes’ name mentioned. I’m glad I was able to read some of his work and put him into prospective. From the biography and his writings, I can see that fear has an important role in his philosophy, and I can see this influence in John Wilmot’s writings as well (Wilmot’s “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” 139-143). Hobbes’ “Natural Condition of Mankind” appears to me to be really pessimistic about the natural state of mankind. He argues that men by natural are equal, but when they both want the same things, they become enemies. In the end, they will destroy one another. If one man is secure in his home, he must be aware that another man will try to come and take it away, which is ironic, because he states that man uses war to secure himself—but it seems that man can never be secure. Therefore, man must work hard, build a dominion over other men, and use those men to protect himself in order to maintain his existence. He also argues that man must protect himself by guarding his family and possessions, but in doing this, he accuses mankind of being evil. Finally, he concludes that without a common power, there is no law and no justice, “Force and Fraud are in war with the cardinal virtues” (8). It all seems like a terrible, vicious cycle.

John Wilmot, who read Hobbes (Griffin 20), writes in “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” that it is better to be an animal (a monkey) than a man. In his poem, he describes the pride of thinking (reason) as unnatural, and that it makes life less enjoyable. At the same time, he argues that there are two kinds of “reason,” the good “true” kind and the evil kind, which he despises (112). True reason reasons by sense (the five senses), which Hobbes also taught (99). He evokes Hobbes’ philosophy about the nature of man when he asks “Which is the basest Creature, Man or Beast?” (128). He answers his own question by pointing out that “But Savage Man alone does Man betray” (130), which mirrors Hobbes’ thoughts about the savage cycle of man and war: man must make war in order to have peace.

Dustin Griffin, in his book Satires Against Man, explains that Wilmot’s poem was also influenced by Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny writes that:

In fine, all other living creatures pass their time worthily among their own species . . . fierce lions do not fight among themselves, the serpent’s bit attacks not serpents, even the monsters of the sea and the fishes are cruel only against different species; whereas to man, I vow, most of his evils come from his fellow-man. (qtd. in Griffin 159)

I learned from Griffin that Wilmot read and was influenced in his writing by not only Pliny and Hobbes, but Boileau and Menander’s Crato as well. For instance, view the following similarities between Crato and Wilmot. Crato imagines that:

If some god should come up to me and say: ‘Crato, you, after your death, shall again have being anew and you shall be whatsoever you desire – a dog, sheep, goat, man, horse – for you have to live twice. This is decreed. Choose what you prefer.’ Forthwit, methinks, I’d say: ‘Make me anything but human.’ (qtd. in Griffin 150).

Here is what Wilmot writes in his “Satyr”:

Were I (who to my cost already am / One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man) / A spirit free to choose, for my own share, / What case of flesh and blood i pleased to wear, / I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, / Or anything but that vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational.

By reading this addition source, I broadened my scope of ancient Greek dramatists (specifically because I had to “Google” them in order to understand their significance). I also learned a new word, Theriophily:

a word coined in 1933 by George Baos to name a complex of ideas which express an admiration for the ways and character of the animals. Theriophilists have asserted with various emphases that the beasts are (1) as rational as men, or less rational than men but better off without reason, or more rational than men; (2) that they are happier than men, in that Nature is a mother to them but a cruel stepmother to us; (3) that they are more moral than men. (Dictionary)

I also enjoyed reading the poetry of Aphra Behn. “The Disappointment” fit in our readings with Wilmot very well—both wrote about premature ejaculation, sexual promiscuity, and the pain of sex. I also found that she has a beautiful way, like Wilmot, of turning very intricate phrases, “But Charming Cloris, you too meanly prize / The more deserving Glories of your Eyes” (“To My Lady Morland at Tunbridge 40-41). In the poem to Morland, the speaker seems to admire Morland and finds her “too good for her faithless lover” (Mermin 345). The speaker advices Morland how to get the best of Amynthas, whose love the speaker lost to Moreland. She admits that she does not blame the man for falling for Morland, but she does seem to accuse him of misrepresenting himself to her (the speaker), “The Reverend Man who Age and Mystery / Had rendered Youth and Beauty Vanity, / By fatal Chance casting his Eyes your way, / Mistook the duller Business of the Day, / Forgot the Gospel, and began to Pray.” I’m not sure that I am right, but I take this to mean that Amynthas had proclaimed to the speaker that he was above youth and beauty—being an enlightened man—but immediately falls for a younger, more beautiful woman. This poem is unique in that it displaces heterosexual love in favor of female solidarity (Merin 345).
Works Cited
Behn, Alphra. British Literature: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Demaria. Malden: Backwell,
2001. 225-45.
Ferguson, Moira. First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
Griffin, Dustin. Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.
Mermin, Dorothy. “Women becoming Poets: Katherine Phillips, Aphra Behn, Anne
Fitch.” ELH 57 (1990): 335-55.
“Theriophily.” Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 2003. University of Virginia Library. 3 February 2008 .
Wilmot, John. British Literature: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Demaria. Malden:
Blackwell, 2001. 279-96.

Out with the Old and In with the New: Theoretical Studies in 18th Century Literature

My Readings for Eighteen-Century Literature this week, Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown’s “Revising Critical Practices” (1987) and Deidre Lynch’s “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century” (2007), provoked ambivalent reactions from me as a struggling student trying to make my way through the thick fog of theoretical understanding. On the one hand, Nussbaum and Brown’s argument that traditional eighteenth studies “relies more heavily on appreciative formalist readings that seek to describe a stable core of meaning in the text, or on a positivist historicism, unreflective about its theoretical grounds or its political implications” (4) proved true for me, especially since I had to privilege of attending an eighteenth century conference recently. I was shocked to listen in as seasoned professors read essays with no critical theory and no psychological or sociological connections between the aesthetic work and its peripheral context. However, after reading Lynch’s year-end review of recent eighteenth-century publications steeped deep in theory, I began to yearn for some gold ‘ole plain-spoken conversation.

Nussbaum and Brown suggest that “theory” too-often suffers attack for either being too formalist or not formalist enough and also for neglecting literary pleasure (2). They list several encumbrances that inhibit the advancement and acceptance of theoretical methods of study within the eighteenth-century scholarly arena. With blatant frankness, the authors accuse traditionalists of “ignorance and misinformation” as well as using “opportunistic . . . manipulation of the term in order to marshall an omnibus defense of eighteenth-century literary studies, traditionally defined” (sic) (2). One problem in particular that haunts theorists is the “contradictory definitions” that inhibit a clear understanding of “theory.” As a result, traditionalists assume that “theory” “is a place where the struggles over meaning are fought” (11). Because “theory” is “only infrequently mentioned’ in the year-end reviews,” traditionalist assume that theoretical models are “useless,” especially since they see the jargon, cant, twisted syntax, and neologisms as evidence of a “destructive despotism of theory,” where monists see only singular meanings and one truth (12). Finally, these traditionalists contend that advancing complicated theories will only distract scholars and students from the aesthetic value of literature. In other words, they see theoretical studies as enhancing only an elite culture of theorists (13). After slogging through the second half of Lynch’s article, I can understand the traditionalists’ fears.

Twenty years have passed since Nussbaum and Brown’s call for theoretical studies in the eighteenth-century arena, and Lynch’s year-end review reveals evidence that a new generation of scholars have embraced modern theories of critical analysis. While reading the review, I soon noticed how the “where” and “what” in British Literature has been redefined. For Instance, Ian Baucom’s scholarship succeeds in relocating the boundaries of British Literature to the “Black Atlantic,” and using Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he examines how literature exposes the capitalization of slaves, redefining them as a commodity (726). Furthermore, Daniel O’Quinn’s body of work “put India on the stage,” by refiguring Britain’s empire as “Asiatic” rather than “Atlantic” (727). I noticed that recently published texts include subjects such as women’s writings, victimhood and the cultural meanings of global commerce, European against Non-European “Other,” the economic history in the Far East, sentimental abolitionism, the rhetoric of speeches and sermons, and the limits of humanity.

In addition to new ways of looking at literature, recent studies reveal new ways of defining literature. Lynch’s reviews disclose recent published works that analyze period fashion, patronage versus print capitalism, the tradition of prostitution, visual rhetoric, and periodicals. Also, I am surprised (I don’t know why—it seems obvious) to see that analyzing recent treatment of literature and history within film is an area of study for the eighteenth-century scholar. This shift in eighteen-century scholarly work is contributed to Nussbaum and Brown’s article by Corrinne Harol and Kimberly Latta, in their introduction to Eighteenth-Century Studies (2006).

Corrinne Harol and Kimberly Latta argue that this criticism “prompted the formation of the ASECS Women’s Caucus,” which nurtured feminist scholars as well as “feminist scholarship and eighteenth-century studies” (289). Nussbaum and Brown’s 1987 article had criticized ASECS for not encouraging “other timely, political, and intellectually challenging approaches” and that they had “in effect institutionalized the traditional relationship between literary and historical study” (8). Harol and Latta claim that:

Feminist scholarship of the last thirty years has arguably transformed western literary criticism, history, and philosophy more than any other single methodology, and its effects on eighteenth-century studies have been no less profound. (289)

The ASECS promoted a return to “key questions that were shared by the Enlightenment and early feminist scholarship,” whereby epistemology and aesthetics contributed to initial discourses supporting “early feminist critique of Enlightenment modes of knowing and valuing” (Harol and Latta 290).

Within the realm of humanities, scholars worked at understanding the experience of art. The authors explain that empiricism inherently limits the understanding of physical experience in materiality and unavoidably excludes any knowledge of taste, pleasure, morality, or ideology (Harol and Latta 290). Therefore, aesthetic scholarship utilized empiricist’s methods in order to establish universal standards of taste. Feminists subsequently engaged with “Enlightenment legacies in incredibly sophisticated ways: by recovering feminist philosophers . . . forming new feminist philosophies, most prominently a feminist epistemology” (Harol and Latta 290). Harol and Latta’s article proved reader friendly and helped me “bridge the gap” between Nussbam and Brown’s text and Lynch’s. As a result, I have a better understanding of the influence of the Enlightenment on feminist scholarship.
Nevertheless, due to the complicated level of diction and theoretical thought, I found Lynch’s review disheartening. The essays she summarized appeared inaccessible to me. Would I need an in-depth study of Foucault, Deidre, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism in order to understand the conversations in eighteenth-century studies? Because so much of the review’s content escaped my understanding, I am lead to identify with Howard D. Weinbrot’s comment that the “concept of literature pleasure thus is in danger’ due to the modern study of “theory” in literature” (qtd. by Nussbaum and Brown 3). Ironically, Nussbaum and Brown argue that “the most important work . . . always insists on the relations between ideology, gender, race, and class, and on the functions of the oppressed and excluded in texts and culture formations” (20); in modern theoretically studies, I tend to “identify” with those “excluded in texts.”

Works Cited
Harol, Corrinne Harol, and Kimberly Latta. “Introduction.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.3 (2006): 289-94.
Lynch, Deidre. “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.” SEL (2007): 723-64.
Nussbaum, Felicity and Laura Brown. “Revising Critical Practices: An Introductory Essay.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature. New York: Routledge, 1987. 1-22.

Socialism and Pirates

This semester I plan to journal on my classes. This journal entry reflects my readings in my Early American Literature class. In case you cannot tell, we are focuses on Pirates and Dialogism.

I'm taking this opportunity to use Depp's picture--wouldn't you?

Lawrence Osborne’s article “A Pirates Progress: How the Maritime Rogue Became a Multicultural Hero,” chronicles “new studies,” if we consider 1998 “new,” in pirate lore. Osborne posits the question on whether pirates are thieving, mass murderers in need of repentance as the 1704 account, “The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch, And Others of his Company,” implies or are they the floating democratic socialists with biker, rock star-like lifestyles such as recent studies suggests. It seems hard to believe, yet it is true, that pirating was once considered a favorable and patriotic occupation. Both Drake and Morgan pillaged and plundered Spanish towns and shipping vessels; Drake alone netted Queen Elizabeth “a cool $100 million” in modern-day currency (Osborne 36). As a result of the 1713 Treaties of Utrecht, pirating ceased plundering under the protection of a national flag and created what some scholars describe as an anarchistic, socialist, floating utopia employed in “social banditry” (Osborne 37).

The impetus of these new ideas stem from archeological findings of sunken pirate ships like the Whydah, which sunk in 1717 and belonged to the pirate Sam Bellamy (of course, he has a rock star name). Deducing that pirates were democratic socialists based on a few silver plates with Masonic image engravings seems a little flimsy. Although, I do accept Kenneth Kinkor’s argument, based on contemporary eye-witness accounts, that black pirates were socially accepted as equals by white pirates. Curious enough, Kinkor stated that pirating “manifests itself as criminality, but it is in fact the expression of social discontent” (37).

This idea of the subversive interests me in that I am considering Bakhtin’s idea of carnival and how it influences social protest and counterculture as an area of study for my doctoral degree. I am both amused and intrigued by Hobsbawm’s and Christopher Hill’s Marxists analyses of “social banditry.” I’m only amused because the idea of socialist pirates sounds so peculiar and extreme. But Hobsbawm’s explanation that pirating evolved from the transition from “peasant economies to capitalism” and reflected a “desperate response to upheaval,” posits a new take on pirates for me, and if we consider the 1960s message music movement in conjunction with the civil rights and anti-war protests, we can definitely view pirates as 17th century versions of counter-culture rock stars. If we accept this argument, then the pillaging and plundering of property would represent a dialogic response to the upper stratum of society, the bourgeois and aristocratic society. In essence, the pirates, who Marcus Rediker describes as “proletarian outcasts and miscreants,” pillage and plunder not only for their own survival, but they also, through violence and invasion, demand that their voice be heard. Through economic loss, the bourgeois capitalist society “hears” the counterculture protests of the pirates. My interests are still further intrigued by the suggestion that the pirates’ “alternative society” influenced the culture that comprised Colonial America and the antiauthoritarianism that lead to the revolution. (But, I pause here to interject that we must remember that America was founded partly by a large criminal element that arrived on our shores as indentured servants.)

The idea that pirates endorsed a dialogic scheme where all stratums of society come together on a level playing field for discourse seems to be supported by Captain Johnson’s 1724 History. Johnson’s listing of the “Ten Articles,” a type of pirate code, reveals the welcoming of a dialogic voice in several of the articles: “Every man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment” and “Equal title to the fresh Provisions” (41). Finally, I’m interested in Rediker’s forthcoming narrative “The Many-Headed Hydra.” I’m curious to see if his analogy of the hydra to pirate unity can be connected to Bakhtin’s critique on vitalism in which he examines, under the influence of Kanaev, the hydra’s propensity to reform after being divided in half (how does this affect the soul?). He frames his theory in the context of modern dialectical materialism, a Marxist philosophy that would further support the socialist tendencies of those social bandits.

Certainly these images of pirates differ from our other class readings. Cotton Mather’s “An Account of the Pirates with Divers of Their Speeches and Letters,” and “An Account of the Behaviour and last Dying Speeches of the Six Pirates, that were Executed on Charles River, Boston Side, on Fryday June 30th 1704,” reveal an overwhelming pressure to conform to religious submission. We can tell little about the pirates in these accounts. For the most part, they confess their sins and beg that messages be sent to their brothers and wives instructing them to raise their children in strict religious instruction. These requests make sense to me for two reasons. First, a comment in the trail transcript of the pirate John Quelch renders the repentant confessions suspect. On page six, the writer states that before any judgment of death, the offender should be given a chance to “plainly confess their Offences, (which they will never do with-out Torture)” (parenthesis in original). This little parenthetical aside is what Bakhtin would call “double-voiced discourse.” In other words, they torture pirates until they confess, so why would they not torture them to confess to Christ? Second, it is overwhelmingly noticeable that these pirates entreat their readers and family to instruct children in the ways of Christ. If the dominate authority were directing their confession, again, assuming they were tortured, then the subject of children proves vital specifically because they represent the future. Other religious concerns of these contemporary writings include: Do not break the Sabbath, drink, or blaspheme, do not succumb to temptation as “I” have, and remember that it is not too late to repent. These contemporary readings definitely de-romanticize pirate culture, which, I suppose, is the purpose.

A Reader Response to MLK's Why We Can't Wait

“Because there is more to come; because American society is bewildered by the spectacle of the Negro in revolt; because the dimensions are vast and the implications deep in a nation with twenty million Negroes, it is important to understand the history that is being made today.” (King 2)

While “today,” in the above quote by Martin Luther King, Jr., references a movement over forty years past, readers of King’s narrative Why We Can’t Wait cannot help but feel his urgency as if it were “today” and come to internalize the immediacy that called forth the need for action King and other civil rights movement leaders fought so hard to convey to a nation. In this text, King explains to his readers why Americans cannot wait any longer to stand up against social injustices upon Black Americans. Social justice delayed, argues King, is “justice denied” (69). One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, King calls an end to enforced “patience” when he accepts Fred Shuttlesworth’s, chairman of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (A.C.H.R.), invitation to bring the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C. L.C.) to Birmingham and births a movement destined to change the life of every American regardless of race: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (65). King’s narrative Why We Can’t Wait explains to readers how Black Americans struggled to attain “the American dream” amidst unjust laws and racism, thereby forcing Blacks to enact a social revolution.

King informs readers that there are just laws and unjust laws; it is the unjust laws that prove to be the greatest foe of the Civil Rights Movement. After the Supreme Court desegregated the military and the public school system they sabotaged their own ruling by approving the Pupil Placement Law that permitted states to determine which schools children may be placed. As King explains, this ruling in essence permitted a back-door system of continued segregation. Furthermore, just when Ralph Abernathy and King decided to “present [their] bodies as personal witnesses in this crusade,” Bull Connor wins an injunction directing the movement to cease the protest marches until a court could hear the case (57-59). “An unjust law,” according to King, “is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself” (71). This code breaks the most basic law of humanity, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The white dominate society did not have to subject their “patience” to submitting to and obeying the “unjust laws” that clearly targeted one section of society. In his book, King reveals the inner conflict and mixed emotions of the S.C.L.C. leaders with civil disobedience; however, they understood that the injunction was another instrument the South used to “block the direct-action civil-rights drive and to prevent Negro citizens and their white allies from engaging in peaceable assembly, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment” (58). The injunction would delay justice for several more years. In order to fight these social injustices, King enacted a plan that would highlight the brutalities of “official” government as well as emphasize the vulnerable position of Black Americans in the hands of those whose job it was to “protect and serve.”

“Begin modest,” argues King (44), and King could not begin more modest than non-violent direct action. King explains that “it is an axiom of social change that no revolution can take place without a methodology suited to the circumstances of the period” (20). Non-violent direct action works specifically because it “seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue”—an issue that “can no longer be ignored” (67). This action, which welcomed people of any age, sex, race, or ability, fed on the knowledge that “we were right” (49) and incorporated tactics such as the defenseless submission to verbal and physical abuse by legal authorities, peaceful marches, freedom songs, and boycotts. By becoming outwardly powerless revolutionaries became politically and spiritually powerful.

As readers we must remember that we read King’s narrative with the luxury of a more informed awareness of our history. King’s contemporary audience depended on news accounts for information on current events; these venues of media were controlled by the white dominant society and were typically biased accounts construed in such a way as to not rouse emotions or back lash from the Black community or their White allies. As a result, most Americans, especially White Americans, were unaware of the dire and brutal circumstances that Black Americans lived and suffered daily. It is in this context that King felt compelled to explain the impetus that lead to the stormy Civil Rights Movement as well as to lay out constructive ideas for future civil action, such as civic restitution and the formation of a powerful Black American political bloc. People, he observes, cannot be “half free or half alive” (117-18). Moreover, “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live” (Shuttlesworth qtd. by King 44). According to King, the summer of 1963 “erupted into lightning flashes, trembled with thunder and vibrated to the relentless, growing rain of protest come to life through the land” (1). Sometimes we feel most alive after we have survived a storm.

Needing a laugh moment

My dad is doing okay. He "coded" yesterday, but everything is okay now. His heart is still weak. Today, I just wanted a laugh moment, so I turned to one of my Favorite movies, The Big Lebowski. Dad really holds the family together. Here's to you dad . . Enjoy . . .

Argument Essay Aid

I use this Video to teach my students about arguments essays. Just saying "because I say so" is not enough.

Sam Houston's love letters

I just spent several hours in the UT Arlington archive reading ORIGINAL love letters from Sam Houston to Anna Raquet. Uh, he was married, btw, but filing for divorce. So, why was I there? Well, I'm taking this American Literature class that focuses on epistolary discourse. Our professor just published a book, To Marry an Indian, consisting of letters to and from Harriett Gold (a white woman), her American Indian husband Elias Boudinot, and her family--those who approved and disapproved of her marrying an Indian. Well, the book consists of an introduction and letters. And she would like for us to experience the same type of primary research. So, to this end, I will be transcribing 150 year old letters, annotating them, and composing a 10 page introduction. All told, in the end, the project should be more than the 40 req'd pages. I'm actually excited now that I have a good subject. I had intended to do the Hamilton/Burr duel, but it has already been done and was done well. I saw no sense to redoing it for busy work. The Houston letters have been done as well, but the editorial process the editor used was not up to scholarly standards, and there is must room for improvement.

In my Victorian Literature class, I will be analyzing the Victorian fairy tales of Anne Thackeray Ritchie through a feminists lens. (cough) I guess I should mention that I know absolutely NOTHING about feminism!!! So any books or sources that you think might help me, I'd loved to hear about it. I talked to a professor today and she recommended some books. I requested an inter-library loan for a book she published in America in 1868, but there are only 3 libraries nation wide, so I probably will not be getting that loan, at least I'm not pinning my hopes on it. Well, this is a summary of two of the projects I'm working on currently. I am very excited about them and hope I can pull them off with quality. LD