The Long Eighteenth

As one of the governors of the city’s hackney coaches, carts, and carriages, [Swift] enjoyed preferential treatment by the coachmen of Dublin, but this pleasure, along with his delight in evening walking, had to be curtailed because of dizziness. Swift nevertheless continued to regard the liberty of St Patrick’s (a precinct independent of the archbishop’s administration) as a little world under his own absolute control. (Clive Probyn, ODNB, “Jonathan Swift”) (image from Sacred Destinations Travel Guide)

 It’s funny how much we associate Swift with cities, but these are never major cities, at least not in his own mind.  The Journal to Stella has some superb descriptions of London, and apparently there was an intended trip to France (and, I presume, Paris) in 1727 that was scotched because of George I’s death and Stella’s final decline. 

But throughout the writings, satirical and otherwise, there is always his rage at displacement, his perpetual sense of not being where he is supposed to be, at the centers of power.  Dublin is not London.  No surprise that Said wrote about Swift with such solicitude as both an exile and intellectual.  But how easy is it to imagine Swift in Addison’s or Prior’s position, as a successful politician, courtier, or diplomat who just happened to be a major writer?  When I read Swift on the abuses of power, I always see an element of vengefulness and disavowal there, as if to say, “this is what I might have become.”  For Swift, the pain of exclusion is what provides his insight into the workings of power.

DM

 (”Homo Bulla” (”man is a bubble”) image courtesy of the Nieuwen ieucht spiegel (1617))

While I’ve been grading papers and presiding over the slow death of my spring semester, dire predictions of cultural decline have been popping up all around me like sad, wilted flowers.  So let’s catch up on this week’s month’s Harvest of Hand-Wringing, shall we?

1.  The Bad News about English Studies.  Bill Deresiewicz  has published an essay about the decline of the English major and English studies generally.  To give us the bad news, Bill relies upon–you guessed it– the most recent MLA job list.  On this basis, Bill informs us that the “profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.”  Well, no.  There aren’t many teenagers out there reading “ecocriticism” or working on “digital humanities projects,” whose mere existence Deresiewicz takes as an affront (damned computers!). 

My problem with these kinds of op-ed pieces (which are called “jeremiads” if they appear in print, and “pissing and moaning” if they appear on blogs), is trying to gauge the real seriousness of the argument and its claims.  To wit: is WD really trying to generalize about the state of the profession at this historical moment, across the country, from top to bottom of the academic hierarchy, on the basis of a single year’s job list and his own time at Yale?  In other words, what precisely does he know about current conditions of teaching and research in literature departments elsewhere, and how does he know it?  These are the kinds of questions I would put to someone who claimed to represent academic values like curiosity, thoroughness, and intellectual independence.  Similarly, I would expect to see much more analysis of the economics of academic work across the country, if I were to take this analysis more seriously as an account of the profession right now. 

More importantly, WD has left untouched what I consider to be the truly difficult problem of higher education its current, precarious state: what does it mean for college curricula, and higher education generally, to be “responsive” to the public, its needs, and its preferences, when so many different interests and constituencies are competing to “represent” the public and its demands?  Who gets to represent the public, and what constitutes a response, in those situations?  At the very least, WD all but ignores the administrative role in  constructing the supposed “preferences” of the public for lean, mean, and up-to-date faculty and curricula, whatever those terms might signify in individual institutions.  At the very least, administrators are the ones who sign the checks for hires and sign off on tenure decisions, and so their role should not be neglected. 

On the other hand, WD, as others have pointed out, does not appear to believe that other scholars and faculty could be sufficiently interested in topics like Equiano or Ecocriticism to develop their research and teaching interests along those lines.  This cavalier attitude towards others’ work seems to me to be a drastic, perhaps wilful, misrepresentation of the research and publications that scholars have been doing since the Theory boom petered out.  I also find it unlikely that during our own era of the Great Cutbacks at both universities and university presses, that the relative numbers of rote, reflexive versions of cultural studies or whatever would exceed the numbers of rote, reflexive books we had in the days of the standard 5-author literary monograph. 

Finally, to accuse others of “trendiness for the sake of trendiness,” as WD does, is simply to announce your lack of interest in their pursuits.  Though intended as a criticism, it’s equally an admission that you don’t know (or care) why they pursue their work in this manner.  Nonetheless, Derisiewicz deserves some credit for raising these issues, and for provoking the thoughtful responses from CR of Ads Without Products and Joseph Kugelmass of the Valve.  Now let’s see if he responds to them.

2.  Why people with tenure sometimes feel free to criticize its effects.  The difficulty of generalizing about academic life (see above) seems most evident when I find myself reading and disagreeing with scholars like “Claire B. Potter” (Tenured Radical) or Tim Burke (Easily Distracted) about issues like tenure, academic freedom, etc.  

Debates about tenure, however, do look different in the SLACs (small liberal arts colleges) as opposed to large public universities, because these tend to be places where hiring occurs less frequently, full-time labor covers much of the teaching, and bad university practices like adjunctification and exploitation of grad students are a moot point in those places.  (If I’m incorrect about this, please correct me.)  And of course, these kinds of schools offer their own challenges to faculty, but governance necessarily appears different under those conditions.

Nonetheless, Scott Jaschik’s Inside Higher Ed piece about tenure demonstrates just how stratified these debates about tenure have become.  The Tenured Radical’s objections to tenure seem plausible, as far as they go: tenure destroys job mobility, is ineffective in comparison with faculty unions, fosters unnecessary mystery and proceduralism around the tenure process, and creates (potential) sinecures for those who do not deserve them.  In fact, the most valuable observation in TRs postings involves the current opacity of the tenure process in most institutions, which often encourages unscrupulous faculty and administrators to manipulate the system. 

But I also think that TR has neglected the imbalances of power enforced by our (manipulated) job market when faculty face the current tenure process: from the perspective of the profession’s future, “job mobility” seems like a less drastic problem than the inability of newly-minted PhDs to get tenure-track jobs in the first place.  Moreover, the ability of candidates for tenure to manipulate the system is minimal, compared to the long-term players, including chairs, P&T committees, and of course administrators. 

It’s unclear to me, then, how an alternative system of corporate style performance reviews could do a better job of reducing the gamesmanship in assessing candidates, especially if the role of “peer review” is reduced for candidates’ departments.  So while I think there are plenty of problems with the existing system, the solution might reside in strengthening and elaborating the notion of peer review, rather than weakening it.  From my perspective, we need better, more transparent forms of peer review, not less.  Otherwise, we might as well go back to the days described by the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship, where Chairs essentially made the decisions by themselves.

Best,

DM

Roach’s chapter on “flesh” begins with Westminster Abbey’s wax effigies.  Charisma and stigmata still emanate from the effigy of Charles II, “exuding the most intense of the contradictory qualities that reliably excite the fascination of It: vulnerability in strength, profanity in sanctity, and intimacy in public” (175).  Here “It” is framed into slightly more of a formula than in other sections (”reliably excite…”).  Later in the chapter, in contrast, Roach will invoke various chance elements in the formation of It, folding in the social dynamics and circumstances that combine unexpectedly to make “It” possible.   This chapter circles around the reproducibility of It, seen again through Pepys as a modern figure, a “self-fashioning parvenu,” who emulated his sovereign by having a cast of himself made up (175).     

A book that has been so passionately concerned with mimetic desire turns to “Pygmalionism, the affliction that makes creators fall in love with the images they themselves have forged” (176).  The success of “It” is “charmed exponentially by the number of its copies” (177). Performers and agents are beginning to do in the eighteenth-century what will become commonplace in our time–Roach uses language like “pioneering” or “presaging” modern experience.

(In a fascinating moment, Roach refers to the “wormhole” in Pepys diary that “opens up uncannily in the 1660s and drops the reader off, as Elinor Glyn rightly intuited, at the movies in the 1920s” (176).  I liked and was heartily dazzled by “wormholes” here . . . any thoughts on this?)

But I digress!  The It effect depends on another strong juxtaposition, quite a fleshly one.  The sacred icon is “fashioned from the detritus of the quotidian, the abject, and the profane” (180).  Thus the Pygmalion story possesses a deep-seated ambivalence, very much at work in Cinderella/ Galatea/ Eliza’s ascent from utensil to ornament.   Roach is also careful to stress that “charisma is an expression of shared needs . . . neither always reducible to, not ever separable from, the real or imaginary flesh of the prodigy” (187).   

So how much of the It effect is created by being in the right place at the right time?  As Roach notes, “there must be social as well as individual chemistry here, a volatile mixture of common needs catalyzed by special opportunities” (184).  More than just the It person is in play, especially to create “It-Zones” like Covent Garden, or Hollywood–both the “worshipped and the sacrificed” are necessary.  Roach’s reading of Pygmalion, which which he ends the chapter, is quite wonderful, and sheds much light on the wider meanings of performance: “By turning untutored vitality into refined inutility before our very eyes, the action of Pygmalion recapitulates the transformative act of performance itself.  As synthetic experience, performance furnishes forth the products that imagination wrests from the raw material of inchoate possibility’ (192).  There, in a nutshell, is one of the great concerns of the book. This chapter shows the dual nature of fleshly transformation, the combination of charisma and stigmata that marks the modern attainment of the It effect.

Above all, this chapter impressed me with its remarks about the selective nature of It (”while many are called, few are chosen,” 183).  Roach lauds the efforts of performance historians to look at a wider group of performers and those who made performances possible in a variety of venues, hitherto unnoticed and unsung–but poignantly acknowledges that the It effect tends to dominate even the most historically attuned academic studies of performance.

[courtesy of Susan/Miranda of Wordwenches]

I thought it would be helpful to have some illustrations here, at this point in the discussion.–DM

                In its contemporary meaning, “It,” Joseph Roach explains, was “coined in 1927 by a British expatriate, romance-author, and Hollywood tastemaker Elinor Glyn (1864-1943)” to describe the unusual allure of certain people. Glyn herself had “a quirky interest in animal magnetism.”  For Roach, though, Glyn was not the inventor of “It” but a pivotal figure who reveals “It’s” transatlantic migration.  In Roach’s study, Glyn also serves as a synecdoche for a larger phenomenon of cultural transmission, providing a bridge between eighteenth-century theatricality and early twentieth-century Hollywood. A “Tory radical” with a fascination for the Stuarts, Glyn helped shape early Hollywood sensibilities. She fashioned Clara Bow as the “It Girl”—both a new phenomenon and an echo of a particular charisma/ stigmata born in London, 1660.  Roach’s study is not, however, a history of “It”; instead, the book explores the ways in which the Restoration ushered in this charisma/stigmata mode as part of the theater’s new claims to some of the traditional power of religion and royalty.  As I read it, Roach’s argument suggests that with the waning of the traditional powers of divine right from the monarchy unleashed the possibility of another related of force—“It.” Thus, as the cover of the book suggests, the figures of Charles II and Clara Bow parallel each other in their combination of residual aristocratic magic, theatricality, erotic allure, earthiness, and vulnerability.

            This argument seems to me to both draw on and differ from classic new historicism. In one of the originary new historicist essays, Louis Montrose argued that Queen Elizabeth, faced with the challenge of ruling as a woman, harnessed her erotic power as a political strategy, the success of which was evidenced by the pleasant dreams of Simon Forman and explored in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Similarly, one might say that Charles II cultivated his apparently copious erotic appeal as part of his monarchical strategy.  Yet at the same time, royal seduction after the beheading of Charles I became an entirely different matter.  Charles II’s performance of kingship came to share quite a bit more with the actor Thomas Betterton’s performance of kingship than Elizabeth’s ever did with the boy who played Titania.

            This brings us to perhaps the largest claim of the book: what Roach calls the “deep 18^th-century century,” adding a third dimension to our current confidence that our period’s length and width. The significance of “It” in modern culture might be taken to be one example of many ways in which the eighteenth century has not ended.

            How, then, does the naming of the “deep” eighteenth century differ from what many in the field have been claiming for a long time—i.e., the invention of modernity, for better (Sprat, Habermas) or worse (Swift, Horkheimer and Adorno)?  One difference lies in what exactly the period has left us.  It does not characterize the eighteenth century as having bequeathed Enlightenment reason, Richardsonian sentiment, or even Gothic uncanny.  Alternatively, (although not necessarily to the exclusion of these other legacies) the century gives us “public intimacy,” a mode that depends on print culture and a public sphere (which is another way in which Roach’s argument about Charles II necessarily differs from Montrose’s classic argument about Elizabeth.)  The Renaissance certainly had theater, but not anything like the reproduction of images in a commercial public sphere we see in the 1700’s. 

Roach’s method also distinguishes this study from previous claims about the Enlightenment. There is little discussion of how public intimacy may have changed since the eighteenth century; little discussion of the difference between Clara Bow and Charles II. Thus, this is not a progressive narrative of change over time, but instead a sort excavation that begins in the near-present with the pivotal figure of Glynn, tracing cultural movement through Glynn’s apparent idiosyncrasies that turn out not to be idiosyncratic at all. We all, in Roach’s argument, participate in the production of “It”: “Like the mythical figure of Pygmalion, who modeled an image with which he promptly fell in love, the consumer of celebrity icons does the work of creating the effigy in the physical absence of the beloved.”

Casting my vote yesterday in the “Potomac Primary” (yes, for the one who has “It”), I wondered exactly what kind of power “It” possesses.  Roach convincingly suggests that having “It” can bring considerable pain along with privilege to the bearer, who can become the target of malice. (I’ll leave the Brittany Spears analysis to others.)  Yet doesn’t the migration of “It” from Charles II to Clara Bow suggest a different kind of power as well?  The politics of celebrity have attracted much attention in cultural studies, and certainly the power of the media to shape the lives of women in particular has been the object of considerable attention in feminism.  If “It-” girls and boys can’t necessarily wield their it-power to their advantage, who benefits from “It”? What are “It’s” costs and who pays them?

My provisional answer to this question is that Roach’s study excavates the power of theater rather than a theater of power.  It is not a cost-benefit analysis (although this doesn’t mean that we can’t go on to ask those questions, I think).  There is even perhaps a hint of weariness with this critical strategy, one I have seen in other quarters as well.  Theater, including contemporary media images, operates in part through fraught memories of both allure and loss.  I think it is important that Glyn’s attraction was to not just any royal family, but to the Stuarts; to the “losers of history” (to borrow Luke Gibbons’ phrase).  Thus the political and ideological force of our world of mediated “It,” which has attracted considerable analysis, is not really under scrutiny here, but rather (I think) a very particular kind of royal echo that lends considerable force to the world of images.  The story of the Stuarts has long been one of exile and loss, of a “charisma and stigmata” as Roach puts it, that has little to do with the Georges.  Or another way to put it might be that the particular combination of allure, eros, privilege, authority, and spectacular loss that the Stuarts represent created the perfect storm for the generation of “It.”  In Roach’s formulation, “It” depends on a certain undermining of royal authority and thus could not have existed in quite the same way before Charles II.

Roach’s study, then, offers a powerful and uncommon strategy for identifying the importance of the eighteenth century, not so much as the origin of modernity, but as the beginning of a still-present mode of cultural organization, expression, and circulation.

Laura Rosenthal

I just saw this advertised today in the New York Times.  This play was Peg Woffington’s big break in London, in the role of Sir Harry Wildair.  It’s not a cross-dressed part: she was simply cast as the male lead, with legendary success. 

A wealthy heir and avowed man of pleasure, Harry courts the disreputable Lady Lurewell and the virtuous Angellica, whom he comically mistakes for a prostitute.  The Life of James Quin, Comedien tells a much-repeated anecdote: 

 The Constant Couple
by George Farquhar
Directed by Jean RandichNovember 13- December 23

Purchase Tickets Online

George Farquhar’s youthful comedy The Constant Couple (1699) invites us into a London teeming with colorful characters. Steadfast Colonel Standard wants nothing more than to win the charming Lady Lurewell. But his way is littered with scheming rivals, troublesome fops, and bumbling rustics, all of whom seem to have some claim on his lady love. Combining all the wicked joy of the jaded Restoration stage with the “novel” notion that faithfulness and integrity might have their uses too, The Constant Couple illuminates a world merrily careening between deceit and honesty, cynicism and hope—between the follies of the past, and the glorious possibilities of the future.

Courtesy of Strange Maps, “A Simplified Map of London.”  Click on the image to get the full-sized map.

You will notice that I was located in the, uh, southernmost “Losers” section last summer. 

And I wonder how differently this map might have been drawn in 1707 or 1807?

DM

Dear All,

I am inviting proposals for papers on an approved panel entitled “The Long Restoration: Literature and Culture, 1649-1737″ at the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference to take place at Auburn University, February 14-17, 2008. This panel hopes to expand our understanding of the social positionings of British writings composed or published during the years surrounding the Restoration of the monarchy.

From the beheading of King Charles I in 1649, the catalyst for the seventeenth-century’s best-selling book, Eikon Basilike (1649), to the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, which resulted in the closing of most of London’s small and fringe theaters, the years increasingly known as the Long Restoration Period were a fertile time for prose, poetry and drama. This panel invites papers that explore literature composed or published during the period, especially those alert to literature’s political, social, scientific, religious or cultural contexts. Writings during this period were often part of a discursive thread of social commentary, in which authors, male and female, sought to participate. By focusing on a selection of writings and their contexts, this panel hopes to trace these discursive threads for a better understanding of this prolific period of socially engaged literature and culture.   

Proposals should be sent to the Panel Chair, Kamille Stone Stanton stonek_at_savstate.edu, any time before October 1, 2007.

Details about the conference can be found at the conference website: http://www.auburn.edu/academic/societies/seasecs/callforpapers.html

 ‘Mr.Thrale’s House’, Streatham Park, situated off Tooting Bec Road, facing the common.The house was made famous by the family’s association with Dr.Samuel Johnson, who was a frequent visitor here between 1765 and 1782.

[image and caption courtesy of Ideal Homes, at http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/lambeth/streatham/thrale-house-01.htm]

Well, I’m packed and ready to leave Streatham tomorrow morning.  Then I’ll be winging my way back to Houston, which is just as rainy as England, only not so cold.

In the meantime, why don’t you look at the Wikipedia entry for the history of Streatham, described there as a ‘multicultural inner London suburb South of Brixton,’ and which had a few worthy visitors during the 1770s:

In the 1730s, Streatham Park, a Georgian country mansion, was built by the brewer Ralph Thrale on land he bought from the Lord of the Manor - the fourth Duke of Bedford. Streatham Park later passed to Ralph’s son Henry Thrale, who with his wife Hester Thrale entertained many of the leading literary and artistic characters of the day, most notably the lexicographer Samuel Johnson. The dining room contained 12 portraits of Henry’s guests painted by his friend Joshua Reynolds. These pictures were wittily labelled by Fanny Burney as the Streatham Worthies.

Streatham Park was later leased to Prime Minister Lord Shelburne, and was the venue of the negotiated peace with France that lead to the Treaty of Paris (1783). Streatham Park was demolished in 1863.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streatham

Not many traces of the fashionable spa-town remained where I was staying.  It was also amusing to see that Lord Thurlow, the beetle-browed, bullying, and unlovable attorney beloved by George III, had had an estate there, memorialized now only by an ugly apartment building, Thurlow Towers, down my street.

DM

In the interest of equal time on the Enlightenment issue, here is the call for the next discussion. Virtual contributions welcome: 

Please join the University of Maryland English Department Eighteenth-Century Reading group for a discussion of:

The Enlightenment: FOR or AGAINST? (Part 2)

Did the Enlightenment free humanity from the tyranny of superstition or did it create more powerful forms of social control through new technologies of power?  Did it lay the groundwork for fascism or for human rights?  Have you ever wondered what Swift was really making fun of in Book 3?  Unless you’re too busy purifying the English language, find out and weigh in on the Enlightenment on Wednesday, August 1, 1-3 pm in Susquehanna 3105, University of Maryland.  As usual, refreshments will be served. All are welcome.

Readings for Part 2:

 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 

(both are available on Amazon)